Word: khomeini
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Formed in 1979 as Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's personal militia, the IRGC acquired a reputation for suicidal human-wave attacks in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. After Khomeini's death in 1989, the government of then President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought to channel the guards' fervor into reconstruction projects, allowing them to dip into the coffers of massive religious and charitable foundations known as bonyads; in time, the guards came to control the foundations themselves...
...despite the presence of a conservative crowd, the hard-line regime cancelled a major speech at the mausoleum earlier this month during Ramadan by the most prominent of Khomeini's 15 grandchildren, Hassan Khomeini, who also happens to be administrator of the shrine. Hassan, like many of his relatives, including at least three other grandchildren and a daughter of the Imam, has come out in support of the opposition movement. The move was just the latest in a string of developments in the past few weeks that revealed the regime's efforts to maintain control, even at the risk...
...back-and-forth with Hassan Khomeini has become especially public. It began last February, when Hassan criticized the country's military for encroaching into politics. In retribution, a newspaper connected to Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the élite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), accused Khomeini's grandson of corruption and driving a BMW, marking the first time the regime insulted the Beit-e-Imam, the heirs of Khomeini...
...news agencies have launched an all-out media war against him, questioning his political credentials and suggesting he has been colluding with the "manipulators" - that is, opposition leaders like Mousavi and former President Mohammed Khatami. If history is any guide, the regime likely has the upper hand here. Ayatullah Khomeini's most promising son, Ahmad, died under suspicious circumstances at age 49. He had become critical of his father's successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, in the mid-1990s...
Indeed, there already seems to be an ideological purge in the works. In a recent interview, Khamenei's representative to the IRGC declared that everyone "should obey the living Supreme Leader. Some people are sticking to Imam Khomeini's ideas; they should know that [Khamenei] has run the country for the last 20 years. The situation has changed." Before the brutal postelection security crackdown, Khamenei at least tried to appear to be an impartial, albeit autocratic, ruler, but that image was shattered by his June 19 speech bluntly threatening opposition protesters with violence...