Iranian IRGC, Basij units skipping duty as cracks in Tehran's regime widen, ambassador says

Small units within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Basij have reportedly begun refusing to report for duty, signaling emerging cracks within the regime, Israel’s Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter told Bloomberg on Sunday.

“The edifice of this tyrannical regime is cracking. It has not opened up to wide chasms yet, but that's the direction it's going,” Leiter said, adding that it wasn’t just Iran’s military capabilities that were being degraded, but also the morale of its armed forces.

“We have small units within the system of the IRGC and the Basij, which are not turning their weapons yet on their superiors, but they're not showing up for work,” Leiter said. “And that's a first. It's developing, and it's a process.”

He went on to compare the Iranian government with historical regimes that ultimately fell.

“We never knew exactly when the Soviet Union would fall, or exactly when the Romanians would turn their guns against Ceausescu,” Leiter said, but in the case of the Iranian people, “this is a people, 92,000,000, who want freedom, who want something else, who don't want the boot of the repressive regime on their necks anymore.”

Earlier in the interview, Leiter addressed the Iranian missile attacks on southern Israel. The ambassador, referring to the volleys launched at Dimona, said that the Islamic Republic was likely aiming for the nuclear research facility there.

Iranian media had said at the time that the facility was targeted in retaliation for a strike that hit the Natanz nuclear facility. The IDF had said it was unaware of the attack. Leiter also said he did not believe that Israel struck Natanz.

The attack “did not strike our research center, but that's certainly where it appears they were aiming,” Leiter said, but noted that scores of people were wounded in the “mass-casualty” event.

Further, addressing the endgoal of the war against Iran and the prospect of the conflict concluding with the regime remaining in power, Leiter said that, ultimately, the goal was to remove the possibility that there would be “an entity in Tehran which is capable of firing massive numbers of ballistic missiles, achieving a nuclear weapon, and supporting proxies around the region.”

Leiter listed these objectives as the minimum requirements of the war, suggesting they needed to be achieved on the battlefield, as Tehran was not a trustworthy partner in negotiations.

“They're mass killers, and murderers do not tell the truth,” Leiter said, pointing to the Sunday missile attack on the Diego Garcia joint US-UK military base, some 4,000 kilometers away from Iran. 

“Look at the ICBM that was fired yesterday,” he said. “They claimed for years and years, ‘we don't have an ICBM.’ Well, they did. And the ICBM that can be fired at 4,000 kilometers, you know, give them a little bit more time, and they're gonna have an ICBM that's gonna hit Chicago.”