What You Can Do: A Global Citizen’s Guide to Fighting the IRGC

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is one of the world’s most powerful engines of state-sponsored terrorism, internal repression, and regional destabilization. Its reach stretches from Iran’s prisons and protest crackdowns to proxy wars in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon, and even to assassination plots and cyberattacks in Europe and North America.

But this is not just a government issue. It’s a global citizen’s issue.

If you care about human rights, justice, democracy, and peace, you can help stop the IRGC. You don’t need to be a diplomat, soldier, or politician. You just need to act.

This guide outlines practical, effective ways that any individual anywhere in the world can help fight the IRGC’s power and support the people resisting it.

1. Understand the IRGC’s Role

Before acting, it’s important to know the facts.

The IRGC is not a conventional army. It is a military, intelligence, ideological, and economic force that:

 • Suppresses protests and women’s rights in Iran

 • Runs secret prisons where people are tortured, raped, or executed

 • Funds terrorism through Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ, Houthis, and other proxies

 • Controls much of Iran’s economy through front companies and smuggling

 • Targets dissidents abroad with cyberattacks, threats, and assassinations

 • Destabilizes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen

 • Evades sanctions using shell companies and foreign business partners

Learn their tactics. Learn their structure. Then help dismantle it.

2. Use Your Voice: Raise Awareness

Silence enables impunity. Information disrupts it.

A. Share Verified Information

 • Follow and repost updates from trusted human rights groups (e.g. Amnesty, Iran Human Rights, Justice for Iran)

 • Share survivor testimonies, fact-checked news, and videos exposing the IRGC’s crimes

 • Educate others about the IRGC’s links to terrorism, oppression, and economic theft

B. Challenge Disinformation

 • Correct misinformation and false equivalencies about the IRGC

 • Report pro-IRGC propaganda accounts or bots on social media platforms

C. Start Conversations

 • Talk to friends, family, colleagues, or classmates

 • Use your platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn) to amplify voices of those fighting the IRGC

3. Demand Terrorist Designation in Your Country

The U.S. has designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Most of the world has not.

Why Designation Matters:

 • Freezes IRGC assets abroad

 • Criminalizes material support

 • Cuts off funding and banking access

 • Enables arrests and civil lawsuits

 • Sends a clear political message

What You Can Do:

 • Contact your representative or member of parliament: Email, call, or meet them

 • Sign and circulate petitions for terrorist designation (Change.org, Avaaz, local civic tools)

 • Write op-eds or letters to editors in your local news outlets

 • Join or organize rallies targeting embassies or parliaments

 • Push parties to adopt designation as official policy

Even one voice in the right place can tip the balance.

4. Expose and Boycott IRGC-Linked Companies

The IRGC controls thousands of front companies, some of which operate abroad or have business relationships with foreign firms.

A. Research Connections

 • Use open-source intelligence (OSINT) to investigate company ownership and partners

 • Use resources like Iran Watch, Treasury Sanctions lists, and investigative journalism reports

 • Identify businesses that are IRGC-linked, directly or indirectly

B. Take Action

 • Avoid buying from or investing in companies doing business with the IRGC

 • Pressure universities and pension funds to divest from IRGC-linked assets

 • Launch or join boycott campaigns

 • Email or message companies asking about their ties to Iran’s military-industrial economy

5. Support Victims and Survivors

The IRGC has thousands of victims—political prisoners, torture survivors, exiled dissidents, families of the executed.

They need more than sympathy—they need support.

How You Can Help:

 • Donate to legal aid, trauma care, or resettlement organizations

 • Sponsor survivors if you are in a country with private refugee sponsorship programs

 • Host or attend events that center survivor voices

 • Translate and share stories into other languages for broader reach

 • Volunteer skills (legal, tech, art, therapy, journalism)

Organizations like United for Iran, Center for Human Rights in Iran, and IHRDC support direct survivor aid and accountability efforts.

6. Protect and Amplify Whistleblowers

Those who leak documents, audio, or testimony from inside Iran or the IRGC risk their lives.

Support Strategies:

 • Share their information with proper context and without exposing personal info

 • Help platforms and journalists verify and preserve leaks

 • Defend them when IRGC trolls try to discredit or silence them

 • Push social media platforms to ban IRGC-aligned disinformation networks

Whistleblowers are the IRGC’s biggest internal threat. Stand with them.

7. Help Build the Evidence for Justice

Legal accountability takes time—but it starts with documentation.

How You Can Contribute:

 • Collect and archive videos, screenshots, or records of IRGC crimes

 • Report digital attacks or doxxing by IRGC cyber units

 • Submit evidence to international tribunals, NGOs, or journalists

 • Support lawsuits by donating to legal fees or spreading awareness

Even if you’re not a lawyer, your digital vigilance can help build war crimes cases and sanctions files.

8. Lobby for Smart Sanctions and Policy

Not all sanctions are equal. Smart, targeted sanctions against IRGC commanders, businesses, and enablers are effective.

Ask Your Government To:

 • Expand Magnitsky-style sanctions on IRGC-linked individuals

 • Sanction IRGC cyber units and surveillance companies

 • Freeze assets of IRGC front companies and holding groups

 • Use universal jurisdiction to prosecute torture and terrorism cases

 • Ban IRGC officials and families from travel, education, and banking in your country

Policy is shaped by pressure. And pressure starts with you.

9. Support Movements Led by Iranians

Avoid speaking over those most affected. Instead, support their leadership.

 • Center Iranian activists, women, and survivors in your advocacy

 • Share their campaigns and ask how to help

 • Collaborate with diaspora organizations already working on IRGC accountability

 • If you’re a student, start or join campus solidarity groups

 • If you’re an artist or writer, elevate Iranian voices through your work

10. Resist Apathy and Normalize Action

The IRGC thrives in silence and fatigue. It counts on the world to stop caring.

Push Back By:

 • Staying informed—even when the media moves on

 • Reminding others of why this matters: freedom, justice, lives

 • Turning grief or outrage into organized action

 • Measuring success not just by immediate results—but by the pressure you build

Every sustained action keeps the movement alive.

Conclusion: The Power of One Voice

You are not powerless.

The IRGC is a military machine—but it fears truth, resistance, and global solidarity. Every time you post, organize, investigate, donate, or simply refuse to be silent, you chip away at the walls it hides behind.