by WorldTribune Staff, March 30, 2026 Non-AI Real World News

Iran in 2026 is much the same as the Soviet Union in the 1980s where the real power rested less with the current leader in the spotlight than with the KGB.

In Iran, the power behind the ruling mullahs is and has been the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), not the military, Geostrategy-Direct.com has consistently reported.

“IRGC has managed to combine the religious authority of the mullahs with the darkest of secret police forces to send a powerful message to Iran’s nearly 90 million people: Don’t mess with us,” contributing editor Steve Rodan noted in a 2024 analysis.

“Sometimes, the mullahs have their way. Usually, they just shut up,” Rodan added.

The IRGC controls Iran’s economy, military, security forces, prisons, intelligence, nuclear weapons, satellites, foreign proxies and war — whether in distant Yemen or Israel.

After devastating attacks by the U.S. military and Israel on Iran’s security and energy infrastructure, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is now fighting to maintain its powerful role in Iran’s regime and economy not out of a fanatic dedication to the clerical system but out of concern that their money gravy train is about to be derailed, a report said.

“Iran’s sprawling security apparatus isn’t solely held together by ideology. It is underpinned by a system of economic incentives that make the regime’s collapse a direct threat to the livelihood of its acolytes,” a March 29 Wall Street Journal report noted.

Though established as a military organization after the 1979 revolution, including control over Iran’s missile program, the IRGC controls major sectors of Iran’s economy, with estimates suggesting it manages or influences up to one-third to one-half of the country’s GDP.

The IRGC “rewards loyalists with cash and careers and other opportunities in exchange for crushing dissent and staying true to the regime,” the Journal cited academics and analysts who study the Iranian regime as saying.

Recent polling shows only 20% of Iranians support the regime, but the IRGC’s depth of social and economic control “is helping the regime maintain cohesion despite the weekslong Israeli and American air campaign eroding its leadership and infrastructure,” the report said.

That system will make it very hard to persuade those who profit from it to turn against the regime, said Ali Vaez, head of the Iran project at conflict-resolution firm Crisis Group.

“Millions of people get benefits from their loyalty to the regime,” Vaez said. “They don’t want to lose them.”

The perks include things like cash vouchers, priority entrance to universities and access to foreign currency at preferential rates or cheap loans.

The IRGC, made up of at least 125,000 paid personnel, operates as a quasi-state corporation. It trades in consumer goods and dominates major infrastructure sectors such as oil and gas, construction and telecommunications.

The IRGC also controls big companies that have been given public contracts for dams, highways and metro lines, hospitals, high-end hotels and coffee shops, according to public disclosures by Revolutionary Guard-controlled companies.

Conservative clerics allied with the IRGC control large religious foundations, or bonyads, that together with IRGC companies, control more than 50% of the economy, according to a December 2025 report by the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch geopolitical research center.

“This ‘military-bonyad complex’ is the fundamental glue of Iran’s political economy and underpins the state’s economic power,” it said. “This complex remains unbroken” and “allows for little domestic political change.”

The IRGC’s companies and affiliated religious foundations are tax-exempt, according to Iranian law.

“Young regime loyalists get priority at Iran’s best universities, putting them in line for top government positions and well-paid jobs at companies controlled by hard-line factions,” the Journal report said, citing people who have studied and worked with the loyalists.

The report added: “Guards companies tend to attract some of the brightest graduates by offering wages up to five times higher than normal companies, said a former petroleum engineer who worked at a subsidiary of Revolutionary Guard-owned conglomerate Khatam al-Anbiya. But he said from his experience those of his colleagues who were in the Basij got faster promotions and received perks such as company cars and housing.”

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  Money: The tie that binds in Iran’s IRGC regime is privilege not fanaticism, WorldTribune.com