I created Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and watched it spiral into monstrous murder machine. I fled to the West... but I don't feel guilty

By IMOGEN GARFINKEL - SENIOR FOREIGN NEWS REPORTER Published: 14:03, 11 July 2026 | Updated: 14:16, 11 July 2026 In January, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps butchered approximately 30,000 Iranians protesting against the government in a brutal crackdown. Morgues quickly filled up with rows of grey body bags, as distraught relatives anxiously searched for the remains of their loved ones who had been indiscriminately massacred. Horrific footage surfaced of security officials ramming vehicles into screaming demonstrators, killing and injuring civilians trapped in their path. Some 47 years ago, this brutal army was built by Mohsen Sazegara – a Left-wing activist who, aged 23, became one of Ruhollah Khomeini's earliest advisors and quickly rose to prominence in the Islamic Republic. At the time, Sazegara was sure the introduction of Sharia law into Iran would create a 'paradise on earth', and looked to the supreme leader as 'a man of God' who would preside over a harmonious and just society. Eventually, he became disillusioned with the repressive regime and attempted to reform it from within, leading to his imprisonment and eventual emigration to the United States, where he campaigns for a more democratic Iran in exile.  Now Sazegara admits that the army he founded as a young man has transformed into a merciless killing machine, 'a dragon with seven heads', he tells the Daily Mail. Once loyal to the government, today he compares the Islamic Republic to Frankenstein's Monster and Isis, wielding a form of 'Islamic fascism' he is determined to see crumble. But when asked whether he feels guilty about the part he played in the early Republic, Sazegara curiously says 'no' – insisting he didn't create the 'monster' that the organisation has spiralled into today. Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) soldiers march in formation during the annual military parade marking the Iraqi invasion in 1980, which led to an eight-year-long war (1980-1988); in Tehran, Iran, September 21, 2024 A member of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps shows his AK47 weapon during an annual rally to mark Quds Day, or Jerusalem Day, in support of Palestinians, in Tehran, Iran, April 5, 2024 A Left-wing student activist since leaving school, Sazegara, now 71, was part of a generation of Iranians who rallied against the pro-West, capitalist Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1978, the mechanical engineer was invited to Neauphle-le-Château, a French commune about 25 miles west of Paris, to help plot the final stages of the Iranian revolution with the exiled Khomeini. He, like millions of others, became convinced that the Shia cleric held the answer to all of the country's woes, and would restore the nation to its Islamic roots, finally free from 'imperialist intervention'.  After the Shah was toppled, Khomeini flew back to Tehran on a chartered Air France flight on February 1, 1979, as millions of Iranians took to the street in jubilation to welcome their leader.  Sazegara was on the 'victory flight' by Khomeini's side, and soon played a decisive role in the new Islamic order.  He was responsible for writing the revolutionary guard's (IRGC) first charter in 1979, and serving on its original board of commanders, bringing the government's main instrument of suppression into existence. To this day, he justifies his decision. 'I have to say that the revolutionary guard that was established was a smart idea, in those days. It was necessary.  'And the idea worked, a year and a half later, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran,' Sazegara says. The plan was to create a 'people's army' to protect the new Islamic order and fend off foreign invasion, especially from the US, who the revolutionaries feared would try to reinstate the Shah in a repeat of the 1953 coup d'état. 'But after three months, I found that I was not good for such a military intelligence job,' he says.  Sazegara subsequently left his role and became managing director of the National Radio of Iran, before serving as a political deputy in the prime minister's office, deputy minister of heavy industries, then vice minister of planning and budget. Over time, however, the politician gradually grew the unshakable conviction that 'something was wrong with this newborn regime, that this is not what we wanted'. One decisive moment was in 1985, when he says he found out that Asadollah Lajevardi, the chief prosecutor of Tehran also known as the 'butcher of Evin Prison', was torturing inmates in their thousands. The number of executions under his personal supervision is estimated to be roughly around 2,500, according to one account. Sazegara returned to university to study history, reread all of the literature of the early revolutionaries – including Khomeini – and started reconsidering his own ideology. 'I found out that the problem of this regime is not accidental, it's essential,' he says. 'It's in the theory of the revolution. The maximal theory of religion - Islamism - doesn't work.  'This ideological, revolutionary, leftist version of Islam, that mostly was imitated from Marxism, doesn't work.  'And for all these reasons, when the war was finished in 1988, and Khomeini passed away, I said to myself, enough is enough, I don't want to work with this regime anymore.' The IRGC is understood to have more than 180,000 active personnel, with a navy and air force, as well as ground forces  Iranian journalist and dissident Mohsen Sazegara speaks to the press in Tehran October 6, 2003 The fact that it took Sazegara until 1985 to notice the human rights abuses committed by the Islamic Republic might seem surprising. Indeed, within months of Khomeini returning to Tehran, the erosion of fundamental freedoms proliferated across the country and by the end of 1982, the new regime had executed more than 10,000 people. 'In the dawn of freedom, there is no freedom,' women were already roaring during a week of protests in March 1979, beginning on International Women's Day, attracting global solidarity from the likes of Kate Millett, who famously travelled to join them, and Simone de Beauvoir.  Chanting 'We didn't have a revolution to go backwards', the women were demonstrating against Khomeini's decree that all women must wear the hijab – something he had promised not to enforce.  'Maybe in my heart, I didn't have time to think about that,' Sazegara says, when asked why he didn't support the women's protest movement. 'But maybe I agreed that they were wrong, that everybody should wear the hijab in 1979,' he admits.  'It took for me three or four years to say to myself: "Something is wrong". But after studying and believing in human rights instead of religious duties... I believed in the rights of the women of Iran to choose their dress code and their religion.  'More than just hijab – the other rights as well. Equal rights for the women of Iran.' Looking back, he explains the complex ideological force of the Islamic Republic that made it so seductive to leftist Muslims like him. 'In those days, almost all of the Muslim activists believed that running a country based on Sharia is the solution. 'That is, if we run the country according to Islamic Sharia, then we will have paradise on the earth... everything is solved, everything is good. Perfection, justice, freedom. 'But this is a theory similar to ISIS, Daesh, Al-Qaeda, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. "Islam is the solution," that was the famous slogan of Islamic Brotherhood.' Over time, the revolutionaries were spurred not only by the promise of Sharia, but also leftist ideology, anti-Western nationalism, the desire for freedom from the Shah, patriotism, and the cult of personality surrounding the mystical Khomeini. 'Here wasn't only a person who ran the country according to Islamic Sharia, but he was somehow a divine man. 'A person who has spiritual mission... not only a political leader or a religious leader, but a man of God. Somebody who had purified himself,' Sazegara says. All of those ideas mixed together created a 'Frankenstein's monster' of ideology that was difficult to resist for young radicals. Sazegara doubts that the militant generals of the IRGC today even believe in Islam, comparing their feigned religiosity to a 'very thin layer of cream over a cake' Sazegara doubts that the militant generals of the IRGC today even believe in Islam, comparing their feigned religiosity to a 'very thin layer of cream over a cake'. 'If you put your fork inside, it is corrupted, and there are many worms,' he says. The IRGC is understood to have more than 180,000 active personnel, with a navy and air force, as well as ground forces. Together with the Basij Resistance Force, volunteer paramilitaries which it controls, it is believed to number almost a million soldiers.  Sazegara uses the 'seven-headed dragon' metaphor to describe the army's present-day pursuits: the ruthless suppression of civilians, terrorist activities abroad, and its mafia-style trafficking of drugs and women for sexual exploitation. The Quds Force is a clandestine branch of the IRGC, responsible for external operations and training terrorist proxies abroad, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen. Together, the armed proxies are called the 'Axis of Resistance'.  Yet despite the influence of the IRGC, power in the country has for decades been concentrated in the all-important Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran: a headquarters manned with 50,000 personnel that is the beating heart of the theocracy. From the headquarters, the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would keep a close eye on every state function, from the armed forces to domestic intelligence and the judiciary system. 'He was a micromanager, he liked to intervene in every detail,' Sazegara says, describing how the cleric built a 'very complicated system mostly in the business of suppressing the people'. The all-important compound, however, was bombed in the joint US-Israel strikes on February 28 which began the current war and killed Khamenei, installing Mojtaba, his son, as the supreme leader. But the new Ayatollah hasn't been seen in public since he was named supreme leader, nor was he sighted at his father's momentous burial, implying he is either dead or severely wounded. 'He is maybe dead, maybe in a coma, or in such poor health that he couldn't appear,' Sazegara says. Even if he is alive and recovers, Sazegara predicts that the 56-year-old will have 'difficulties' inheriting the intricate system his father built, which involved the leader personally dictating every decision, at every level of governance.  He compares Khamenei's system to a suit, 'tailor-made' to his style of leadership. Now that he is dead, Sazegara doubts the same suit will fit his son, and fundamental changes will need to be implemented, potentially leading to instability. While US President Donald Trump urged anti-government Iranians in January to 'keep protesting', promising 'help is on its way', the fact that civilians were slaughtered in their thousands suggests demonstration is not necessarily the way the regime will fall. But Sazegara is still hopeful that the Islamic Republic, which he calls a 'total failure', will eventually see its last days. 'We tried for a while to reform it, to change it gradually from inside and to change the constitution, but the result was arrest and imprisonment.  'This is the reason that there is no other way to change the regime than with the hands of the people, not by foreign attack or war. 'War at most will make Iran another Iraq or another Afghanistan. We need to mobilise the people and use the tactics of civil resistance: not only protests, but strikes, paralysing the regime, non-cooperation tactics, boycotting, not paying the bills.' When he was still in Iran, Sazegara attempted to reform the constitution to separate religion from state and dismantle the system of velayat-e faqih – the concept of clerical guardianship that sees the supreme leader preside over the whole system of government. He served as publisher of several reformist newspapers, including 'Jamee', 'Toos' and 'Golestan-e-Iran', but they were shut down by regime hardliners eager to censor dissent. Sazegara soon began to be persecuted by the state, leading to his imprisonment in 2003 for 114 days, 79 of which he spent on a hunger strike, during which he lost almost 50lb of his body weight. The deterioration in his health following his imprisonment meant he was permitted to go to London for medical treatment in 2004.  Subsequently, he helped launch an internet petition for a referendum on the Iranian constitution that gained the support of more than 35,000 signatories, as well as 300 political and cultural activists in Iran and worldwide.  Since then, he has been sentenced in absentia to seven more years in prison. He was eager to return to Iran but was advised by allies that if he stepped foot again in his homeland, the regime would surely kill him. Sazegara, who was a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute from 2005 to 2009, hopes Muslims across the world learn the lessons of the Iranian revolution, chiefly the fact that 'Islamism doesn't work'. He spent years as a student activist being a staunch opponent of the West but he now believes that 'Western civilization is not only Western civilization: it's something in the chain of the development of humankind' that shouldn't be demonised. Sazegara believes the revolution of 1979 unleashed a wave of fundamentalism in Islamic countries but the fall of the regime may serve as a clarifying moment, helping believers around the world to realise that the 'ideology doesn't work'. 'If in Iran we succeed to show that Islam can actually be a type of secular Islam, a minimal theory of Islam, a liberal version of Islam instead of this leftist ideology version of Islam... then I'm sure that there will be another wave of modernity in the world of Islam and in Western countries, because the Muslims in Western societies are affected by the motherland countries,' he says. As opposed to one momentous uprising, he predicts the nation will change from the inside and only 'gradually, step by step'. While he is hesitant to pinpoint when and how, he is resolute in one remark: 'Iran is famous for being the land of great contraditions and unexpected events.'