BREAKING: IRGC Set to Be Designated a Terrorist Organization by the European Union
The designation does not ensure the Islamic Republic’s end, but it significantly raises the financial and diplomatic price of survival.
After more than a decade of resisting the move, the French government says it will support the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the European Union’s list of terrorist organizations.
Spain has also reversed its position and will support the designation, clearing the way for its adoption.
The announcement comes in the aftermath of the mass murder by the Islamic Republic and its security forces of many thousands of Iranians who were protesting and demanding the fall of the regime — an episode that likely represents the most significant oppression by the Islamic Republic in its 47-year history.
While the IRGC is already heavily sanctioned globally, this move will have the added impact of making Europeans wary of doing business with any Iranian companies, including those not directly owned or controlled by the state.
This is due to the fact that the IRGC has its hands — overtly and covertly — in so much of the Iranian economy that Europeans will be leery of potentially doing business with any entity that may have a connection to the IRGC.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — which is under the direct command of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei — is a powerful parallel military and security organization created after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, established it to protect the Islamic Republic rather than the Iranian state itself.
According to multiple former and current U.S. intelligence officials, Khamenei sets the organization’s red lines and almost always approves its budget requests without micromanaging.
The IRGC operates alongside — but independent from — Iran’s regular armed forces.
And it doesn’t just have a military role, the IRGC wields immense influence over politics, the economy, and internal security.
The IRGC also has the notorious Quds Force under its umbrella.
The Quds Force is responsible for foreign operations, including training, arming, and directing proxy militias across the Middle East, conducting covert activities abroad, and supporting groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah (the Houthis).
An EU designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization is not just a symbolic move.
The designation carries significant legal and operational consequences for the IRGC.
This in turn means substantial consequences for the regime overall, including Ayatollah Khamenei.
Among the impacts of the designation:
The designation will criminalize any form of support for the IRGC across all EU member states.
It will enable asset seizures and prosecutions against IRGC-linked front companies and networks.
It will collapse the long-maintained fiction that the IRGC can be treated as a normal state military actor rather than a transnational terrorist organization.
The move will sharply restrict IRGC travel and activity in Europe.
It will strengthen protections for Iranian dissidents and journalists targeted by the group.
It will allow past acts previously treated as espionage or foreign interference to be reexamined under terrorism frameworks.
While it will not, by itself, end repression inside Iran, the designation significantly raises the cost of IRGC operations in Europe.
It marks the end of years of EU legal and political reluctance to confront the group’s role in terrorism and extraterritorial violence.
The IRGC was first designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2019 under the Trump administration.
That designation impacted the Biden administration’s ability to get the Islamic Republic to agree to a new nuclear deal after President Trump withdrew the United States from the deal that President Obama had negotiated.
The Islamic Republic wanted the terrorist designation withdrawn but President Biden refused.
Statement from the French Foreign Minister:
“There can be no impunity.
The unbearable repression of the Iranian people’s peaceful uprising cannot be allowed to go unanswered. Their extraordinary courage in the face of the indiscriminate violence unleashed against them must not be in vain.
Together with our European partners, we will tomorrow in Brussels adopt sanctions against those responsible for these abuses. They will be barred from entering European territory, and their assets will be frozen.
France will support the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the European Union’s list of terrorist organizations.
The regime must urgently release detainees, put an end to executions, lift the digital blockade, and allow the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Fact-Finding Mission to investigate the crimes committed in Iran.”
If you’re not the type who likes to subscribe, you can also make a one-time donation to support this work by clicking here: make a one-time donation.
For other ways to support my work like Venmo, etc., click here: Other Ways to Support My Work
Please follow me on Twitter (X), Instagram, Facebook, Threads, BlueSky, and TikTok.
Also, be sure to check-out my Instagram broadcast channel for breaking news alerts and my WhatsApp channel for voice notes from me.
If you have a tip, you can contact me at 310-795-2497 or currentyashar@gmail.com. I am available on Signal, WhatsApp, and Confide. My direct messages are also open on Twitter and Instagram.
I’m glad there will be some consequences with this collective recognition of the IRGC’s atrocities. Overdue!
Must be nice to have the world do as you say*. Especially for a nation of 10 million people, being able to dictate the actions of “leaders” overseeing billions of people and trillions of GDP.
*Again, I am speaking about the secular leaders of the state of Israel, this is not a trope about “Jews controlling the world”. The leaders of Israel even from the founding have been secular. It’s important to separate the actions of the state of Israel, and its actions are not the responsibility of the Jewish faith and its followers…No matter how much the state of Israel tries to connect them