“I looked up, and there before me was a ram with two horns, standing beside the canal, and the horns were long.  One of the horns was longer than the other but grew up later.”  (Daniel 8:3   NIV)

We are watching for the start of the Second Signpost – the great war and invasion by Iran – as written about in my book, Hidden In Plain Sight.  In my last two posts, here and here, we saw that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has grown in power to the point that the supreme leader needs the IRGC in order for Khamenei to stay in power.  We also saw some of the IRGC’s idealogy and its differences with the supreme leader. 

The supreme leader was identified in my book as the first horn.  Current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was labelled as the best candidate to rise to power alongside the supreme leader and be the second horn.  But due to the realization that the IRGC is indeed the “king maker” as Ottolenghi wrote in his book [Ref. 1], we see that the man who will occupy the office of the second horn must be in lock step with the core command of the IRGC.  And in this post we saw that Ahmadinejad may not be that man.

So who is at the helm of the IRGC?  Who are the men who make up the ruling body if you will, who are controlling politics and much of the economy in Iran? 

In this post we will identify the names of the men who are the core ruling body of the IRGC – the group who uphold its idealogy, who control a large part of the economy, who engineer elections, and who ultimately will back the man who will be the second horn.  Author Emanuele Ottolenghi has a book titled The Pasdaran: Inside Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (“Pasdaran” is the name of the IRGC in the Iranian native tongue of Farsi).  In it he explains the IRGC’s history, idealogy, and shows some of its structure.  Unfortunately, having been published in 2011, some of its detailed facts such as which men occupy which positions, are already becoming out-of-date. 

However, a remarkable video has been created by Will Fulton of AEI (who has also collaborated with Ali Alfoneh (see Second Signpost links) on past articles).  On the IranTracker website (see links) there is an excellent and remarkable 11-minute video tutorial showing us the group of men that make up the core of the command of the IRGC.  Fulton shows using known data available since the days of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980’s to the present, from meetings, letters, and photographs, that there was a core of 22 men.  These 22 men fought together in the Iran-Iraq War, met together, and of those 22 in high positions, apparently do not have any visible difference in idealogy between each other.  In other words, you have a remarkably cohesive group of men, like a brotherhood.  The narrative of the video itself is remarkable in that its as if the video was made exactly for this website.

What follows is a list I compiled of the 14 men who remain of the original 22 men who are holding a command position or other position of significance.  The list is alphabetical by last name, identified with significant position held. 

As we watch developments in the news for the appearance of the Second Horn of the persian ram, more weight can be placed on statements made by the men in this list, that whatever is said is the true position of the IRGC.  The current president Ahmadinejad is a former IRGC commander apart from this core group.  He was supported by the IRGC because it seemed he would support the desires of the IRGC.  With this experience under their collective belt, I would think whatever leader is allowed to be the president or the second horn will be someone close to the core, if not from the core itself.  From the list above, there is one man who is already in politics.  Mohammad Qalibaf is the current mayor of Tehran and has plans to run for president in 2013.  He will undoubtedly do the IRGC’s bidding much better than the man who was the last mayor of Tehran, who was Ahmadinejad.

References

[Ref. 1] p. 39; Ottolenghi, Emanuele; The Pasdaran: Inside Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; FDD Press; Washington D.C.; 2011.

Categories: Signpost #2: Iran