Iranians TURN AGAINST IRGC as Regime BACKS DOWN to U.S.

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Something happened inside Iran this week that the regime's own state television could not fully hide. Ordinary Iranians, merchants, factory workers, veterans who once waved IRGC flags with pride at Friday prayers, are now cursing the Revolutionary Guard openly. In the streets of Tehran, in the covered markets of Isfahan, in the working-class neighborhoods of Ahvaz where IRGC recruitment posters still hang on crumbling walls beside broken streetlights and burst water pipes, the anger is no longer whispered. It is loud. It is public. It is on video. And the organization that was built to be untouchable, the organization that for 46 years has operated above the law, above the economy, and above the complaints of the people it claimed to protect, is for the first time in its history visibly retreating. That retreat is not happening because of a military defeat on a battlefield. It is happening because of something far more dangerous to any authoritarian system than a lost battle. It is happening because the people the IRGC was supposed to protect have decided in growing numbers and with growing confidence that the IRGC is the primary reason their lives are falling apart. Not the sanctions alone, not the Americans, not Israel. The organization inside their own country that has been eating their economy from the inside for two decades while telling them it was their shield. Let's go to what actually triggered this moment. Because the details matter, and the details are more extraordinary than anything the headline captures.

[00:01:18]In recent weeks, the United States and Iran reached a framework agreement in nuclear talks that involved, among other things, significant American pressure on the IRGC's economic operations. The Revolutionary Guard controls an empire inside Iran that most people outside the country do not fully appreciate the scale of. Ports, construction companies, import licenses for essential goods, petrochemical plants, telecommunications infrastructure, real estate development, automotive manufacturing stakes. The IRGC is not just a military force with guns and missiles. It is the largest single economic actor in the country, controlling estimates ranging from 20 to 40% of Iran's entire gross domestic product through a web of holding companies, front businesses, and state-awarded contracts that ordinary Iranian businesses cannot compete with and cannot challenge. And for years, for decade after decade, ordinary Iranians watched that empire grow while their own purchasing power evaporated. The rial has lost more than 90% of its value against the dollar over the past 10 years. Inflation has run at 40% or higher year after year, meaning that whatever a family saved last year buys significantly less this year. And what it buys next year will be less again.

[00:02:27]A generation of university-educated Iranians, engineers and doctors and teachers, cannot afford to rent an apartment in the city where they were born and where their parents built their lives. And all of that time, through every economic crisis and every sanctions escalation and every currency collapse, the IRGC's business interests kept expanding. Contracts without competitive bidding, awarded through personal relationships between guard commanders and government ministries.

[00:02:51]Import monopolies that squeezed out private merchants who had been running the same trade routes for generations.

[00:02:56]Construction projects funded by the national budget and awarded to IRGC-affiliated companies whose management had no construction expertise but had excellent connections.

[00:03:05]Meanwhile, the infrastructure that ordinary Iranians depend on every single day, the hospitals, the water treatment systems, the provincial roads, the electricity grid, crumbled from years of underfunding and neglect. The Iranian people knew this. They have known it for years.

[00:03:19]But knowing something and saying it openly are two entirely different calculations when the organization you're criticizing has its own intelligence apparatus, its own detention facilities, and a decades-long demonstrated willingness to use both against anyone who steps too visibly out of line. What changed is the nuclear talks. When the Islamic Republic sat down across the table from American negotiators, and the conversation turned to the IRGC's economic empire as a specific item in the sanctions relief discussion, when it became visible to every Iranian watching the news that their government was negotiating over the guards' business interests as a bargaining chip, something cracked inside the system's most carefully maintained fiction.

[00:03:57]The fiction that Iran's economic suffering was caused entirely by foreign enemies and had nothing to do with choices made inside Tehran.

[00:04:04]The fiction that the IRGC was a sacrifice organization. An institution that bled for the nation and asked nothing for itself in return. The fiction that the Revolutionary Guard was the wall standing between Iran and destruction rather than one of the primary architects of the economic destruction that 40 million Iranians are living inside right now. Because here is what Iranians watching those negotiations understood with a clarity that no official statement could cloud.

[00:04:28]They understood that the IRGC's business interests were real, that they were enormous, that they had been built systematically over decades, and that every official who had ever stood at a government podium and delivered speeches about resistance economy and sanctions, resilience and the blessed fruits of self-sufficiency had known about those interests all along.

[00:04:47]They knew.

[00:04:48]Every minister, every parliamentarian, every state television anchor who looked into the camera and told the Iranian people that their poverty was the price of dignity and independence, they all knew that the Revolutionary Guard was simultaneously running a parallel economy that made its leadership extraordinarily wealthy. And now, because of a negotiating table in Muscat and Vienna, everyone knew that they knew. The reaction across Iran's social networks, flowing through the VPN applications that tens of millions of Iranians use every single day to route around the government's censorship filters, was immediate and volcanic. Not just from the usual critics and dissidents whose opposition to the regime is a known and discountable quantity in Tehran's calculations.

[00:05:26]From people who had, until very recently, described themselves as supporters of the system.

[00:05:32]Retired military officers posting video messages dripping with contempt for the Guards' business commanders.

[00:05:37]Bazaari merchants sharing detailed calculations of exactly how much revenue the IRGC's import monopolies had extracted from their businesses over the previous decade. Workers at state-owned industrial companies that had been transferred to IRGC-affiliated management describing working conditions and wage arrears that were substantially worse than what they had experienced under the civilian management that preceded the takeover. And then the street protests started. Not massive, not organized in the kind of coordinated nationwide structure that would constitute a direct military-style challenge to the regime's security apparatus, but something in certain ways more significant than a large organized protest. Geographically widespread, socially diverse, and erupting in precisely the communities that the regime has historically depended on for its base of passive grudging support. In Ahvaz, in the oil-rich Khuzestan province in Iran's southwest, where the IRGC has historically maintained deep social roots, and where decades of unregulated oil extraction by IRGC-affiliated companies has poisoned the air and contaminated the water supply of a region that sits on some of the largest petroleum reserves in the world. Residents filmed themselves pulling IRGC recruitment banners from walls and posting the footage online.

[00:06:49]The symbolism was devastating, and everyone watching understood it.

[00:06:53]Khuzestan is where young men from poor families have for generations enlisted in the Revolutionary Guard because it represented one of the very few reliable paths to a stable salary, housing, and a pension in a province that the central government has chronically underinvested in.

[00:07:07]The fact that those exact communities, the families who have provided the Guard with its enlisted base for 40 years, are now publicly rejecting the organization's presence in their streets is not a peripheral signal.

[00:07:18]It is a signal that strikes at the foundation of the IRGC's social contract with the Iranian working class. In Tehran's Grand Bazaar, which has served as a political barometer of Iranian public sentiment for more than a century and whose merchants helped finance the 1979 revolution itself, traders were openly discussing the IRGC's business empire in terms that would have been unthinkable even 2 years ago. Not in the hushed tones of a private conversation behind a closed door, in the open corridors, loud enough to carry past neighboring stalls, with the specific confidence of people who have made a decision that the old calculation no longer holds, and that continuing to stay silent is now the greater risk. Now, here is the part of this story that almost no Western news coverage is adequately explaining to its audience. The regime backed down. Not completely, not in a manner it will ever acknowledge in public or allow to be reported by state media, but it backed down in ways that are real, that are documented, and that are known inside Iran, even if they are invisible outside it. Specific IRGC-affiliated import operations that had been the loudest source of public complaint had their operating licenses quietly sent for review.

[00:08:22]A construction contract in one provincial city that had become a genuine local flashpoint, where IRGC-affiliated contractors had displaced a civilian firm that had employed hundreds of local workers, was abruptly reassigned to a civilian company with no official explanation offered to anyone.

[00:08:37]A senior IRGC economic official who had become personally associated in public discourse with one of the most resented business monopolies was quietly removed from his position in what internal communications described as a routine administrative reshuffle. None of this was announced. None of it came packaged with an apology, an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, or any official recognition that public pressure had produced a result.

[00:08:58]Because the regime absolutely cannot acknowledge that. An authoritarian system that openly admits it responds to civilian pressure has communicated something to its own population that is genuinely revolutionary.

[00:09:09]The public pressure works. And a government that has spent 46 years telling its people that patience, endurance, and faith in the leadership are the only legitimate responses to grievance cannot now let it be officially known that the organized anger of ordinary citizens against its own most powerful institution has produced concrete concessions. But the quiet retreats happened.

[00:09:29]And in a country where information travels through family telephone networks and neighborhood conversations and encrypted messaging channels with a speed and completeness that the regime's censorship apparatus cannot interrupt.

[00:09:40]The fact that those retreats happened is widely known, not universally, not with precise operational detail, but known broadly enough in enough households and markets and workplaces that the fundamental calculation ordinary Iranians make about what is possible inside the system has begun to shift in a direction that cannot be easily reversed. This is how authoritarian systems actually change when they change, not through the dramatic ruptures that fill international news cycles.

[00:10:05]Through the slow accumulation of small retreats that are never officially acknowledged, that each look trivial in isolation, but that collectively teach a population something that, once learned, rewrites everything.

[00:10:17]They teach it that the wall is not as solid as it was painted, that the organization everyone was conditioned to be afraid of is itself afraid of something, that the mathematics of repression and silence and compliance is no longer producing the same results it once reliably produced. The IRGC is not going to collapse this month or this year.

[00:10:35]Let's say that plainly, without any romanticism or wishful thinking attached to it. The organization has weapons, revenue streams, intelligence networks, and the institutional loyalty of hundreds of thousands of personnel whose careers, salaries, housing, and retirements are bound to its continuation.

[00:10:51]It has shown in 2009, in 2019, and in 2022 that it is willing to use lethal force against Iranian civilians in large numbers, and nothing about its current posture suggests that capability or that willingness has been retired. But, something has changed that no amount of force can put back the way it was.

[00:11:09]The IRGC's moral authority among the Iranian population it was theoretically created to serve has collapsed past the point from which institutions recover.

[00:11:17]When the communities that supplied its enlisted ranks are tearing its banners from the walls, when the merchants whose commercial cooperation it is always needed are auditing its losses out loud in the bazaar, when the parliamentarians whose political function was to provide the guard with institutional cover are instead using floor time to attack its economic conduct. The organization has crossed a line that has no return. It is no longer feared the way that produces compliance. It is resented in the way that produces resistance.

[00:11:43]And in Iran, a civilization whose tradition of popular resistance runs through the constitutional revolution of 1906, the nationalization movement of 1951, the Islamic revolution of 1979, and the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022, that is not a minor distinction. The IRGC is not invincible. 40 million Iranians just figured that out. And the regime, in its small and unannounced retreats, just confirmed it.