With news Iran orchestrated two antisemitic attacks in Australia last year, the federal government has declared the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s Director-General Mike Burgess said the group, known as IRGC, “used a complex web of proxies to hide its involvement” in the attacks on Lewis Continental Kitchen in Sydney and the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne.

The IRGC has a long history in the Middle East as an extremely powerful armed force, both militarily and politically.

Here’s where it came from, how it operates and what it means for Australia.

The IRGC was created after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in which the Western-backed Shah of Iran was deposed by followers of Shia Islamic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini – the first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The organisation was originally created as a force to protect the revolution, both within Iran and internationally. It’s legislated in the Iranian constitution, which says:

The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, organised in the early days of the triumph of the Revolution, is to be maintained so that it may continue in its role of guarding the Revolution and its achievements.

Iran has an army, which is bigger than the IRGC, and reports directly to ministers and government in the same way the Australian Defence Force does.

The IRGC, on the other hand, was created alongside the army but instead reports directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader and other high-level clerics. It proactively defends Iran’s interests, in what scholars call a

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