Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been degraded during the American and Israeli war against it, but remains far from neutralized.
U.S. forces have hit more than 5,000 targets, according to American defense officials, though the campaign is continuing, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday, “Today will be, yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran.”
The number of Iran’s retaliatory attacks has diminished over the course of the war — they’ve targeted American assets and none in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Oman — though the U.S. has “seen some spurts here and there,” he added.
“I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react,” Hegseth said of the IRGC targeting Gulf countries. “But we knew it, but we knew it was a possibility, and I think it was a demonstration of the desperation of that regime.”
One reason the Iranians sought to target Gulf countries, experts argue, is that the Iranians were hoping that the Gulf countries, whom they attacked, would press the United States and Israel to end the war immediately due to the threats facing their own populations. But those countries have sided with the U.S. and Israel, not Iran.
“I think that was an absolute strategic mistake that Iran has made,” Spencer Faragasso, a senior fellow with the Institute for Science and International Security, told the Washington Examiner. “I think it truly shifted the conversation and narrative.”
The distance a missile or drone has to travel from Iran to one of the Gulf countries is much shorter than that of Israel, and Israel had largely defended itself well against two previous Iranian ballistic missile barrages prior to the 12-day war last year, which could also explain why the IRGC has put considerable effort into targeting the Gulf countries.
Prior to the start of the current conflict, the IRGC was one of the most powerful organizations in the country, playing a dominant role in both internal domestic security and regional power projection.
Many of the IRGC’s senior leaders were killed in the opening strikes that also killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Mohammad Pakpour, the most recent IRGC chief, was among those killed during the opening salvo, and it’s believed that Ahmad Vahidi, who had been named deputy chief in December, has taken the reins.
“Vahidi is a long-time IRGC and IRGC Quds Force officer. He was Iran’s first Quds Force commander, and he was the IRGC deputy commander before this war started, and Israel in the U.S. killed the IRGC commander at the time, Pakpour, so he is presumably controlling the IRGC right now,” Annika Ganzeveld, the Middle East Portfolio Manager for the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
The Assembly of Experts — Iran’s deliberative body responsible for selecting the nation’s supreme leader — selected Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the slain leader, to succeed his father, who had been in power for more than thirty years.
His selection as the next supreme leader is “essentially a double down on the IRGC’s ability to influence the state and protect it,” Faragasso added.
“He’s a major insider and supporter of the IRGC, its Qud Forces, etc. So what we’ll likely see, more likely than not, is an expanded control of the hardliners in the iRGC and their influence in state operations.”
Trump has said he wasn’t happy with Mojtaba Khamenei’s selection as the next supreme leader, while both U.S. and Israeli officials have warned that he or other successors could become targets.
The question facing the American president is what victory would look like in their current conflict. Trump vowed that he would not end the war until there’s an “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” from the Iranian regime, though White House top spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday, “he’s not claiming the Iranian regime is going to come out and say that themselves.”
UKRAINE LOOKS TO PROVE ITS VALUE TO AMERICA WITH DRONE ASSISTANCE
It doesn’t look like Iran is ready to back down.
Ali Larijani, the Secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, issued a message on social media to Trump telling him, “Iran doesn’t fear your empty threats. Even those bigger than you couldn’t eliminate Iran. Be careful not to get eliminated yourself.”
The Iranian response has been somewhat successful despite taking its own significant hits. Seven U.S. service members have been killed, six of whom were in Kuwait and one who was in Saudi Arabia, while 140 troops have been injured to varying degrees, the Pentagon announced on Tuesday.