Word: sazegara
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...celebrations, the government has had to mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters, many from outside the capital, and deploy massive force, which belies its claims that the opposition is just a disaffected élitist minority. "By attacking the people on Ashura, the government lost its religious legitimacy," says Mohsen Sazegara, one of the founders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. A former aide to Ayatullah Khomeini, Sazegara now posts videos on YouTube from his home in suburban Virginia giving advice to the Green Movement. Moreover, the costs of such military-style operations are unsustainable, both in their direct expenses...
...were founded in the first year of the Islamic republic in 1979, following a decree by Iran's first Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. "From the start, the Sepah was about building a popular army, one that had the duty to protect the Islamic republic from within," explains Moshen Sazegara, a founder of the Revolutionary Guards who later fell out with the regime and currently resides and works as a journalist...
...These past weeks," Sazegara estimates, "the state has used about 12,000 such plainclothes forces in addition to another 28,000 official police and Sepah forces to control the dissent...
...Sazegara sees the possibility for division. "Many of the commanders in the Sepah have children who are in their 20s and who have joined the recent protests," he told TIME. Since Ahmadinejad took office in 2005, the Supreme Leader swapped out most wartime commanders in the Sepah, replacing them, in Sazegara's words, "with a bunch...
Former Sepah founder Sazegara concurs, adding that many of the plainclothes men controlling the streets and meting out excessive violence to protesters are "intelligence personnel of the Sepah, some of them even with military degrees, but showing up in plainclothes to take on the appearance of the Basij...