Conscripts in Iran’s ‘Elite’ Military Arm Say They Aren’t Trained To Be West-Fearing Woman-Haters

Contrary to western perceptions, former draftees say that being forced to serve in Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps was non-ideological, unserious, and, ultimately, pointless.

By Josef Burton | October 8, 2024 | 12:47pm

In Depth

Conscripts in Iran’s ‘Elite’ Military Arm Say They Aren’t Trained To Be West-Fearing Woman-Haters

Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps during a parade commemorating the anniversary of the Iran-Iraq war in 2011 in Tehran. Photo: Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images

Hossein* is on a video call with me, telling me how he became a terrorist. He didn’t set out to become one, but it’s what he is now very much considered by the United States government, because 20 years ago, through no choice or fault of his own, a stranger waved his hand at a group of young men—including him—and decided that they would be inducted into Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), known colloquially in Iran as the sepah.

The IRGC are once again in global headlines after launching missile strikes on Israel in retaliation for the assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (who was killed on Iranian soil) and the Iran-aligned Lebanese Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was targeted in Israeli airstrikes that also killed Lebanese civilians. Iran’s new cautiously reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who signaled a vague sympathy for Iran’s protest movements during his election campaign and is attempting to avoid regional war, has ultimately made it clear that he will stand with the IRGC when it comes to national defense. The IRGC is the guardian of the Iranian regime: It is an explicitly political army tasked with the preservation of the Islamic Republic system; the United States—and increasingly, the rest of the western world—designates it as a terrorist group; and the name itself has become a sort of shorthand: When the brutal suppression of Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom movement, which began two years ago, is discussed abroad, “the IRGC” is usually who is held responsible.

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But for young men in Iran who must—and they must—report for mandatory military service, the IRGC is something else. In a time of mass feminist street protest and the hyper-politicization of daily life, young draftees encounter life inside the IRGC that is not brutalizing or ideological but rather boring, a waste of time, and fundamentally emasculating. Mass conscription of young men into the IRGC (sepah) seems to serve little actual military or security purpose. Instead, it serves as a humiliating form of gendered social control for educated men that links completion of a randomly assigned, menial duty to any kind of actualized adult life (marriage, a job, even the right to immigrate). You will be a soldier, they’re told, but you will be nothing, you will exist at the lowest possible rank—what the Iranian military terms sarbaz sefr, soldier zero.

Seen from outside, the sepah looks like something exotic and unique. To an extent this is true—not many countries opt to have a duplicate political army—but inside of Iran, it is as much a part of daily life as any other national institution.

Though there is a Western tendency to flatten all Iranian state forces into “the regime,” the distinctions between the different branches matter a great deal to the young men who enter the sepah via conscription. The first thing that should be made clear is that the hated “guidance” hijab police (or ershad) are just that: police. Mostly women (though always male-led), they are a branch of the normal police, arresting people for headscarf violations instead of speeding or burglary.

The basij are plainclothes pro-government, part-time volunteers who mete out vicious violence on demonstrators. This network is under the IRGC’s administration but is totally separate from its uniformed military branch. Saying that draftees working on a sepah base are the same thing as the basij clubbing young women protesters is like saying the TSA guy scanning your suitcase is equivalent to the ICE agent locking migrant children in cages because they both work for the Department of Homeland Security.

There is no becoming any socially understood idea of a man unless the state signs off on it.

Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom protests have been fundamentally centered around these questions of daily life in a way that has reframed preexisting simple divisions of pro- and anti- west attitudes. I spoke with Pegah, a young Iranian feminist who researched debates within the Women, Life, Freedom movement as an academic. “In previous movements, the only men who participated were intellectual men, educated men who would sign statements and petitions, but in this movement it was normal guys who were tired of seeing women they knew beaten.” Forced participation in the military and security forces, even and especially in explicitly ideological institutions like the IRGC, made official government ideology matter less to young men and de-mystified big political narratives. If you know your commanding officer is an idiot, what does that say about the rest of the system? Pegah noted that the fundamental normality of the young guys who made up the bulk of the security forces who are then grabbed out of their lives and forced into rote duties against their will do not make enthusiastic enforcers: “You cannot ask a soldier who is doing his military service in a small town to shoot his own people.”

The Iranian government doesn’t really want total control and will settle for apathy. It doesn’t need to force rank-and-file conscripts to become complicit in suppressing a women’s uprising. It can find volunteers for that—and it doesn’t even need to call out most of its basiji; only a small percentage need to carry out violence to create fear (and a significant percentage of the basiji join for preferential career advancement anyway).

One former sepah draftee told me there was an attempt to recruit volunteers for the basij during his military service; those who signed up were given better wages than the paltry conscript stipend. He didn’t think anyone joined for ideology, though. “If you put food in front of a starving animal, they’ll take it,” he said. Even a lot of the basij just do it to get by. Everything about military service is about getting by.

That’s because young men need to do military service in order to do basically anything: to get married, to buy a house, to get any kind of job other than under-the-table gig work, to get a passport, to leave the country. There is no becoming any socially understood idea of a man unless the state signs off on it.

I conducted in-depth interviews with a half dozen men, all of whom I met through solidarity and advocacy groups for Iranian men who have encountered immigration difficulties due to their sarbazi (military service). Despite the overall dismissive—if not downright spiteful—attitudes I observed about their sarbazi, I wondered if, deep down, being a soldier, even if only for a few months—mattered in some way to these men; if, beyond the complaining, there was a begrudging pride in the manhood-making endeavor of shared suffering and discipline.

The answer was unequivocally and universally no. Absolutely not. Every single man I interviewed mentioned their 60-day boot camp, always in the context of how perfunctory and unserious it seemed. “We only got to fire a gun once,” said Hossein, “and even then they only let us fire 10 bullets.” I would be surprised if even a single conscript was involved in the IRGC’s retaliatory strike against Israel, a technically sophisticated operation.

Their drill instructors weren’t paternal figures to look up to or be scared of, either. Rather, the overwhelming attitude towards leadership seemed to be puzzled contempt. “One time in training we had to walk 14 miles in a single day. Our officer fainted and had to drive alongside us in a car,” Hossein told me. “It was so funny.”

Members of the IRGC attend Friday prayers in Tehran, in January 2016. Photo: Scott Peterson/Getty Images

Another conscript named Arash didn’t especially hate the sepah officers, he just didn’t understand how a bunch of middle-aged inept officers could constitute a threat to the western world. “There was nothing elite about these guys,” he said. “It was like they couldn’t get any other job so they wound up in sepah.”

Shahzad had three masters degrees when he was drafted, but for two years his only given assignment in the IRGC was to fill out a single spreadsheet for daily water budgeting. “Americans think we do Hollywood shit when it comes to the military,” he said. “We aren’t jumping out of helicopters. We are just witnessing our time being wasted.”

Despite being an “Islamic” revolutionary guard corps and identified with a nominally religious government, personal piety and official ideology seemed to be an afterthought. Multiple interviewees reported that their officers didn’t even bother performing ritual ablutions before praying, or would use fasting during Ramadan as an excuse to skip work. Basic training, at least in the 2000s, included a single class on Shi’a Islam. And although many members of religious minorities report persecution while in the IRGC, most conscripts seem to be beneath attention. Shahzad said that he was from a Jewish family and nobody seemed to notice or care—not out of any sense of tolerance, but because the draftee doing their water budgeting wasn’t worth their attention.

In this sense, military service—even in the supposed elite and ideological IRGC—is a kind of mirror image of Iran’s hijab laws, the rejection of which gave rise to the Women, Life, Freedom movement. To live your daily life as a woman, every time you leave the house, you have to put a scarf on your head. Maybe you don’t, and you’ll probably get away with it, but if the ershad police spot you, you get a ticket. Or maybe you get detained. If you’re an ethnic minority, maybe they get violent faster. Maybe the truncheons come out, or you run into the metro station and they shove you in front of a train. At no point is there an expectation that you—or even they—actually believe in the state ideology, just that you go along with it.

Military service is a kind of parallel imposition. It’s less every day than the hijab laws (although the police can and do stop men on the street looking for draft dodgers), but for an educated middle-class Iranian man it fulfills the same function; it is in the mandated social position of these young men to do basically nothing in what is supposedly a powerful political army. The former IRGC conscripts I spoke to didn’t know exactly how selection worked, but they were highly educated and were usually in their mid- to late- 20s, doing their military service after having exhausted their options for educational deferrals. (The regular army, the artesh, wants 18- or 19-year-old men from rural or less-educated backgrounds to be the actual soldiers guarding Iran’s borders.)

“You understand eventually there is nothing specific or professional going on there. But this humiliation is enough for men to come outside and say I am oppressed enough and now it is your turn.”

Indeed, the IRGC has more educated and technically savvy young men than they ever need, and Iran’s political leadership is scared of them—not because of anything they’ll do but of what they represent. The Iranian university system (even though women outnumber men within it to the degree that there is now affirmative action for male applicants) produces more educated graduates every year than Iran’s sanctions-weakened economy can absorb. A large pool of jobless young men is felt to be a more dangerous thing than an equivalent number of young women. The Woman, Life, Freedom protests came at the crest of a wave of social unrest in Iran, much of it economically driven. There were protests against a cut in gas subsidies in 2019 which became startlingly violent, driven by frustrated young men with no hope for the future. Tellingly, the uniformed regular sepah was called onto the streets to suppress these protests in a way they never appeared during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

Because there are public revolutionary murals and portraits of ayatollahs everywhere, and because the sepah explicitly defines itself as a revolutionary and political army, there is an assumption that the ideology it enacts will be explicit. But even when men leave their military service changed, it isn’t necessarily in the way the government wants.

Pegah said that her friends and relatives were initially extremely reluctant to talk about their sepah service, which, in some ways, contributes to the myth around it. “Women think these guys are becoming men. But when you talk with someone who is close with you, you understand what is going on inside that place,” she said. “You understand eventually there is nothing specific or professional going on there. But this humiliation is enough for men to come outside and say I am oppressed enough and now it is your turn.”

Western stereotypes cast Iranian men as uniquely misogynist but the reactionary behaviors Pegah saw in her own family were the result of emasculation and humiliation, not women-hating indoctrination. One relative of hers was anti-government in his general outlook but came back from his menial kitchen assignment “a little bit negative towards women.” It was clear, she said, that this was a result of the sepah’s suppression of men; “men will be obedient” during their conscription but, when they leave, “retaliate” onto the women in their lives. “I think it was something psychological because he was becoming suppressed and oppressed a lot,” she said. “He spent two years just cutting onions and wanted to show that now, now I am a man, I’m a big deal.”

When men close to Pegah opened up about their time in mandatory service, it became clear to her that, overwhelmingly, these were just normal men feeling frustration with their social position—something most westerners should be able to easily understand. Because as much as Americans may try to ignore it, Iran is not some totally alien society.

Iran is a country like any other, with police brutality and discrimination against minorities and arbitrary social policies that are disproportionately enforced. But in a very real and legally binding sense, the U.S. government does not see Iran this way. Since 2019, the entire IRGC has been designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), a specific legal category that has serious implications for anyone who has ever been a member, however unwillingly. Other listed FTOs are who you would expect: Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Real Irish Republican Army—all small, underground, non-state organizations. The designation of the IRGC is the first time it’s been applied to any part of an actual government, and it is particularly broad: The Trump administration expanded the application of FTO designation to include everyone who had ever been in the IRGC, meaning those 18 months of mandatory boredom mark them for life under U.S. law.

“I don’t think the larger community gets the implications, I still don’t think Iranian Americans get the implications,” Iranian American immigration attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said of the designation of ex-conscripts as terrorists.

The former draftees are not important to anyone in the U.S. government, but a terrorist is legally a terrorist, and if a former IRGC conscript interacts with the U.S. immigration system in any way there is only one outcome: a lifetime ban on entry to the United States. It doesn’t matter if you’re married to a U.S. citizen or the parent of one, or served just a single day decades ago in the most harmless role—it’s all treated the same.

The logic is, on a global scale, the same that is used to enforce hijab laws in Iran. The ershad police know that many young women only put on their headscarves when they are made to, and that nobody takes seriously the “morality” classes issued as punishments. The ershad also know that they have to keep enforcing the rules because enforcing them justifies their own existence, and because mandatory hijab has become a red line seen as a de facto referendum on the whole idea of the Islamic Republic. The moment a young woman leaves the borders of Iran, this system of enforcement stops. And the moment a young man does, a different type of social surveillance starts.

Shahzad grew up in Iran, and later naturalized as a Canadian citizen. Before the IRGC was designed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2019, he visited the U.S. frequently. That all changed when a U.S. border official noticed something in his file. A routine drive south from Canada to visit family turned into a retrospective interrogation of his past military service by Customs and Border Protection. He was questioned for hours and banned from ever entering the U.S. again. His family was also banned from entry, and U.S. officials detained his dog for six hours. His whole family lives in the U.S. but he has no plans to ever attempt to visit again. “I don’t give a shit about the U.S. anymore,” he said.

What struck me the most in all of these stories, from why these men finally did their military service in the first place to their exasperation at their experiences with western immigration systems, was the overarching feeling of basic decency being denied, their senses of self and manhood were defined by roles they were forced to abandon.

This is how patriarchy functions everywhere for men; it is a social force built on acquiescence and silence, and conscription in the IRGC is a particularly high-profile example of it. The inherent, demeaning authority of the patriarchy is what changes the lives of the vast majority of sepah conscripts who experience it, though western audiences may assume that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards operate solely in a world of lurid, hyper-ideological violence. But these men are not asked to kill, nor are they asked to die. And when their government’s purported enemy, the United States, decides to make an example of them, it does not hunt or target them. They are simply told, by both countries: no.

Josef Burton is a former U.S. diplomat who served in Turkey, India, and Washington, D.C.

*All individuals referred to with just a first name have been given pseudonyms.