Daily Times

The USA has announced to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), otherwise known in Iran as the so-called ‘Islamic’ Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a terrorist organization on Monday (April 8, 2019). What followed is a heated-up debate on broadcast-media across the world as well as on various social-media plaforms.

Whether the decision was right and whether it is a sensible one — needs no futher consideration. Yet the debate that followed on mainstream broadcast-media and various social-media platforms need to be addressed. For this, a bunch of incidents and happenings that have been taking place in Middle East have to be considered alongwith their connection to IRGC.Syria seems the appropriate conflict zone to start with.

In Syria, a 13-year-old boy’s penis was cut off by the brutal mukhabarat (which is the secret police of Syrian dictator Bashar-al-Assad) in 2011. The boy, named Hamza Al-Khateeb, was returned to his family with his body mutilated.Hishead was swollen, purple and disfigured,body was a mess of welts, cigarette burns and wounds from bullets fired to injure, not kill. Kneecaps smashed, neck broken, jaw shattered. The most brutal part of the torture was that, as mentioned earlier, his penis was cut off.After a video of his tortured-body was posted on YouTube, thousands of Syrians rallied and chanted “We Are All Hamza!”.

The boy was among hundreds of children and teenagers who faced the same fate in the hands of Assad’s police and army, though it was the boy’s story that attracted more coverage during the time from the mainstream media.

As Iran’s leaders always try to portray themselves as the symbol of moral values against, what the Iranian leaders call, ‘imperialism’, many in Iran and elsewhere expected them to act — or atleast speak — for the slayed victims and against the heinous activities of Bashar-al-Assad and his loyalists. Iranian leadership instead chose to side with the longtime ally Assad, who was already named — by the people from his own country, the region and world — as the “Butcher”

As Iran’s leaders always try to portray themselves as the symbol of moral values against, what the Iranian leaders call,’imperialism’, many in Iran and elsewhere expected them to act — or atleast speak — for the slayed victims and against the heinous activities of Bashar-al-Assad and his loyalists. Iranian leadership instead chose to side with thelongtime ally Assad, who was already named — by the people from his own country, the region and world — as the “Butcher”.

What followed was horror,terrorand death.First, Iranian leadership’s military arm, the IRGC, had led the campaign ofkilling the Sunnisand non-twelver Shias in thousandsto depopulate many areas from Sunnisand non-twelver Shias — something which is no less than a genocide.

This fear of being killed for their sectarian identities had compelled a portion of the remaining Sunniand non-twelver Shia population to leave their homeland and seek refuge in other countries (partcularly neighbouring countries and Europe) so that they could escape the genocide — something which is no less than an ethnic cleansing.

In Syria, the IRGChad carried out the campaign with the help from Assad’s army and Iran-backed Lebanese militant group named Hezbollah. In Iraq, the IRGChad carried out the campaign with the help of sectarian elements in Iraqi army, Iran-backed twelver-militias in Iraq andHezbollah.

Everyone with the slightest interest in Middle East affairs is well-informed about the sectarian cleasing that happened in Iraq’s Fallujahwith the backing of the Iranian leadershipand IRGC. The Iraqi forces and Iran-backed militias killed thousands of innocent Sunnis and non-twelver-Shias in the cover of “liberating” the area from ISIS.

All of the above said killing campaigns had been monitored, aided and managed in the ground-zero by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is designated as a ‘terrorist’ organization just the other day.

The IRGC-membersthemselves had engaged in the killings of innocent Sunnis in these two countries, particularly in Syria. For years, theIRGC has been training the terrorist proxies inside both Iraq and Syria as well as in other regional countries.

IRGC had also helped Bashar-al-Assad to carryout gas/chemical-bomb attacks on innocent civilians in rebel-held areas in Syria. Every mainstream global media had either published articles or broadcasted the footages of the aftermath of these repeated gas/chemical attacks on civilians.The broadcasted-footages clearly show how civilians, especially the children, died from these attacks. The worst part is that these children had to go through enormous sufferings and pain before ultimately losing their lives.

All the atrocities committed directly or indirectly by the IRGC suggests that if it is wrong to designate the IRGC as ‘terrorist’ organization, it would also be wrong to designate any otheratrocious group as ‘terrorist’. If it is right to designate any atrocious group (including ISIS) as ‘terrorist’, it should equally be right to designate IRGC as ‘terrorist’.

If one poses the question “What we should call a terrorist?”, the obvious answer would be”a terrorist”, and so is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its leadership.

The writer is an international affairs analyst and columnist, writing for newspapers and think tanks