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