Who are Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and what is their role in the crackdown on protesters?

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, is the ideological arm of Tehran’s military, answering to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and stands accused by Western countries of orchestrating and perpetrating the crackdown on protesters. Who are they? The Guards, known as “Pasdaran” in Persian, were founded in 1979 by then supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini “to propagate the ideas of the Islamic revolution”, said Clement Therme, a researcher at the International Institute of...