By Jonathan W. Hackett

The IRGC’s interests in preserving the regime in Iran have deeper roots than mere ideology.

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Since 2007, a small circle of strange bedfellows gained massive wealth while most Iranians suffered under increasingly punishing sanctions. Old IRGC hands increased their personal fortunes by orders of magnitude. Their children relocated to London, Dubai, Monaco.

Over the last two decades, IRGC elites entrenched themselves into something very different than their initial purpose of protecting the regime. They control Iran’s black market for everyday goods, from iPhones to insulin. Their children in London flaunt designer clothes and poolside lifestyles on Instagram.

Sanctioned Iranian businesspeople manage billions of pounds of the IRGC leadership’s wealth in London. IRGC shadow bankers like Ali Ansari and Babak Zanjani find time to dabble in hundreds of millions of pounds of real estate deals in the UK despite sanctions.

Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the pockets of families linked to the IRGC, including the Qalibafs, Safavis, Jafaris, Rafsanjanis, and most of all to the Khamenei family. And the beneficiaries of this windfall will do anything they can to survive, including fleeing to Western locales with relatively lax sanctions enforcement. Should the UK be one of those places?

The IRGC controls the levers of power in Iran. Individual IRGC leaders like Ahmed Vahidi and Mohamed Bagher Qalibaf may disagree over exactly how their repressive policies should be carried out against the Iranian people. But IRGC money continues fleeing to Europe unabated. In 2025 alone, over $36 billion left Iran.

The mafia-like IRGC benefit from years of systemic corruption. They ruled Iran in the shadows for 47 years. Now they seek to rule Iran in public. The West may view a so-called decapitation campaign as a logical antidote to an authoritarian government. Perhaps it is.

But the real power rests with the people who have both the money and the guns: the IRGC. And the IRGC is not a spider that can be struck once for a clean kill. Instead, the IRGC is built to regenerate by design. The IRGC’s money is not in Iran—it is in banks in London, Paris, Hamburg, Moscow, or in safely anonymized crypto wallets via Binance waiting to be converted into investments in European real estate portfolios. That is, unless those countries do something.

The IRGC is not a spider than can be stopped with a single blow. The IRGC is a multi-legged starfish, designed to regenerate, to adapt, to evade. Plucking one leg from a starfish and tossing it into the sea does not kill the starfish. Instead, we are left with more starfish than when the plucking began.

Jonathan W. Hackett is a retired U.S. Marine Corps special operations capabilities specialist and author of Iran’s Shadow Weapons: Covert Action, Intelligence Operations, and Unconventional Warfare.

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