The “Terrorists” in My Grandmother’s Neighborhood

Down a tree-lined street near my grandmother’s house in Tehran is a mosque where locals go to chat, rest, and sometimes even pray. In the back of the mosque, behind a small library, is an office for a youth group that organizes volunteers to teach classes, run food drives, get together on religious holidays, and take trips to impoverished villages on Tehran’s outskirts to build schools. Whenever I visit my grandmother’s house during Muharram, a holy month for Shia Muslims, I see its members handing out food and sweets. The group has branches in most mosques across Iran: within a twenty-minute walk from my grandmother’s house, there are probably half a dozen. They receive a government budget, and they host political events, like celebrations of the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution. Millions of Iranians are members; many are teenagers or young adults, separated into boys’ and girls’ groups.

The group is called the Basij. It is classified by both the U.S. and Israeli governments as a terrorist organization—meaning that under those country’s laws, every one of its members is considered a terrorist. The Basij have always inspired a mixture of fear and fascination in me. As a branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, they are considered the Iranian government’s enforcers at the neighborhood level, taking part in patrols looking for contraband like guns and alcohol, dressing in camouflage, and setting up checkpoints on the weekends. For many Iranians going about their daily lives, they are a major nuisance, an ever-present reminder of the government’s infringement on personal liberties. But as the Basij’s different roles and responsibilities suggest, the on-the-ground reality of what the United States or Israel call a “terrorist group” is far more complicated than what the label captures. Many members of the Basij volunteer to fill gaps in the Iranian state’s social protection infrastructure by offering educational and social services through the Development Basij; others take part in the repression of protests. The organization is simultaneously a paramilitary force and a service-oriented youth group, a combination of leftist-inspired anti-imperialism and revolutionary Islamic discourse. The Basij emerged out of Iran’s particular history, but it also mirrors anticolonial movements worldwide that have historically wed military resistance against outsiders with self-organization of their own communities.

Needless to say, this more nuanced understanding does not feature prominently in the rhetoric of the Israelis and Americans who see themselves locked in an us-against-them battle to protect “Western values” and a U.S.-led world order. From their vantage, the Basijis are terrorists, plain and simple, and terrorists deserve to die. Just like Hamas and Hezbollah, with whom the Basijis share a place on the State Department’s list of “foreign terrorist organizations,” any and all of their members, from those organizing food drives to those building rural schools, are considered fair game. First a justification for the United States and Israel to carry out drone strikes and mass destruction of infrastructure, now a mere subtext for mass murder, the terrorism designation has proven remarkably flexible. In Iran, it’s taken on a new role: turning people within the country against each other.

Over the last decade, I lived in Tehran conducting research about politics and religion in contemporary Iranian society, interviewing government officials, dissidents, and the vast numbers of ordinary Iranians who fall somewhere in between the two. I also spoke with members of the Basij, trying to understand what motivated young people to join, and then stay in, these kinds of groups. My main previous encounter with the Basij came during the 2009-10 Green Movement protests. When I joined crowds in Tehran demanding fair and free elections, it was members of the Basij who pulled me off the streets and beat and detained me, along with thousands of others. Because of incidents like these—and the many rounds of repression against protests since—many Iranians today understandably see the Basij as primarily a force of repression.

Look back earlier, though, and the picture becomes cloudier. The Basij emerged out of neighborhood self-defense committees. Following the triumph of the Iranian Revolution, they were organized into an official paramilitary force in late 1979. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, the Basij mobilized to defend the country; many members signed up to fight at the front lines, building a reputation as a volunteer force of patriots. Mohammad, a Basiji I interviewed, described his years in the group, which he had joined as a teenager, as the most meaningful of his life, a time when he carried on the legacy of a revolution against a U.S.-backed dictatorship. For him, membership in the Basij was about defending his homeland from foreign forces that sought to turn it into a war-torn land like Iraq or Afghanistan. “America calls us terrorists,” he told me in an interview in Tehran. “But we’re defending our own country. They’re the ones who came halfway around the world to kill people.”

For its members, the Basij today is much more than just a repressive apparatus. Many are young men and women drawn to the certainty espoused by the group’s ideology or motivated by adventurism. The group’s revolutionary ideals and slogans, which speak of an ongoing battle to defend the oppressed of the world against the designs of the powerful, are a strong attraction. They offer a sense of stability amid the pervasive volatility that defines most Iranians’ lives in the shadow of the devastating economic effects of U.S. sanctions and bombings carried out by Israel and militant groups. Leila, a member who worked at a Basiji women’s publication and whose first memories are of missiles falling on Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War, explained her commitment in terms of both self-empowerment and patriotic defense. “My parents protested during the Revolution. They were active in relief efforts helping refugees and displaced people during the War,” she told me. “I am carrying out my revolutionary and religious duty to protect my country, just like they did.”

Outside observers in the West have, predictably, accused the Basij of brainwashing its members. A 2022 Time article on the group, for instance, calls it a “Brutal Militia Trained to Kill for Iran’s Islamic Regime”—as if the only reason someone could sign up to a political project not aligned with U.S. foreign policy goals is mind control. In fact, much of the Basij’s ideological analysis emerges from a pretty fair assessment of U.S. policy toward Iran since the 1950s, one in which the country has carried out coups, supported dictators, enforced sanctions that have dramatically impoverished ordinary people, and regularly threatened to attack and invade. For a young person committed to defending faith and nation in Iran, the enemy can often seem glaringly clear.

And while it’s true that the vast majority of Basijis support, at least to some extent, the Iranian government’s ideology, being part of the Basij can also open up contradictions. It’s an awkward position to be carrying out volunteer duties to provide for social needs while the Iranian state increasingly pulls back from provision of social welfare and represses the working-class protesters raising their voices against it. This creates generational rifts and tensions that frequently emerge in the group’s activities. The anthropologist Ahmad Moradi, for example, describes tensions at a factory purchased by the Basij during a government privatization drive. When its Basiji owners tried to cut costs by firing staff, workers went on strike. The local Basiji chapter ended up taking the side of striking workers.

For many working-class Iranians, the Basij is simply a vehicle for social and economic mobility—an access ticket to a better life. The connections built through the group can help students who normally wouldn’t be able to afford private tutoring, for example, advance into higher education or find decent jobs otherwise unavailable to them. I know men who joined the Basij in high school because doing so would allow them to serve less time in compulsory military service.

Understanding who the Basij were didn’t make me less outraged at the organization’s repressive activities, but it did make me recognize how much more complex it was than it appeared from the outside. And as a believer in the need for a free, democratic Iran where a diversity of opinions can be expressed, I also saw members of the Basij as fellow Iranians who would necessarily be part of a shared national future. To the U.S. and Israeli governments, though, they are simply enemies to be annihilated. I learned from studying the Iranian government’s repression that trying to vanquish or annihilate one’s ideological opponents was not only unethical; it was doomed to fail. Labeling the Basij “terrorists” and marking them as enemies to be annihilated not only missed the mark; it also could have terrifying consequences.

Israeli authorities have made no secret of its aim to bring down the Islamic Republic, an aim that, until now, it has pursued through assassinating nuclear scientists, carrying out cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure, and supporting armed groups committed to overthrowing Iran’s government. What would happen if Israel were to become more aggressive in its tactics—to declare a mission to fully eradicate “terrorism” in Iran? If what has transpired in Gaza and Lebanon is any guide, the consequences would be deadly. The fact that there are Basiji offices in every neighborhood in Iran would be enough for Israel to destroy not only those offices, but also the homes and shops around them—and the people who live and work in them. It is also a recipe for civil war, a way to make Iranians see each other as the enemy rather than people with different views who will have to live together in the same country.

Two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined the quiet alleyways of my grandmother’s neighborhood in Iran as a warzone. But over the last year, as I’ve watched Israel rain bombs down on Palestinian neighborhoods, killing tens of thousands of civilians whose only crime was being somewhere in the proximity of “terrorists,” I’ve started to see terrifying parallels. Jabalia and Rafah were once home to quiet neighborhoods where grandmothers lived, as was Dahiyeh, the Beirut neighborhood that Israel has pulverized over the last few months, and the southern Lebanese villages it obliterated. Upon entering Yaroun, one of the first villages Israel invaded in Lebanon, soldiers immediately dynamited a more than three-hundred-year old mosque and destroyed the local Catholic church, a health clinic, and a religious shrine, in addition to dozens of homes. There was no clear military rationale for the destruction, which occurred in a village already emptied of its inhabitants. Where families lived, children played, and farmers worked today stands a smoking carcass.

It’s not far-fetched to imagine that Israel could decide to replicate the destruction it has visited upon Palestine and Lebanon in Iran. Should it decide to do so, it will have a ready-made justification that has already been crafted by its foremost ally. In 2019, President Trump signed an executive order labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), of which the Basij is a part, a terrorist organization, citing its covert operations worldwide and arming of militias across the Middle East. This came only a year after he ripped up the Iran nuclear deal, which had been forged through great persistence on the parts of President Obama and Iranian President Rouhani, both of whom bucked constituents in their countries that preferred war to peace. Labeling the IRGC a terrorist organization is more a reprimand, an attack, rather than a precise definition, especially when the entity doing the labeling has its own bloody hands and a long history of deadly covert operations, coups, and even invasions. By now, it is evident that such a designation is a foreign policy weapon at its core—one capable of bending reality around the aims of its architects.

Recent events in Syria have made this clear. The Assad regime was on the terror list for decades, a status used to justify harsh U.S. sanctions that helped cripple Syria’s economy. In early December, the regime was overthrown by Syrian rebels. In the wake of Assad’s fall, the U.S. administration renewed its sanctions on the country—and said the situation would only change if Syria’s new rulers no longer “posed a threat” to its neighbors. But how could this be, given that the rebels themselves come from a terror-listed organization? The subtext was clear: “terrorism” is indexed by little more than a group’s willingness to comply with the United States’ grand designs for the region. If the new Syrian government normalizes relations with Israel, its name will be erased from the list. If it refuses, the United States will continue considering it a terrorist state and trying to destroy its economy, which is unlikely to recover without sanctions relief. These are similar conditions to those imposed on Sudan following the 2019 revolution, which has led, in part, to the political and economic deadlock that was the background to the ongoing civil war.

Sanctions justified by the terrorist list have become an explicit “economic weapon” deployed against countries that refuse to normalize relations with Israel and refrain from critiquing its genocidal policies. In Syria, this policy is even more egregious because it is being used while Israel has carried out widespread military strikes against Syria and occupies part of Syrian territory—a zone it has expanded since Assad’s fall. On the other hand, an Iranian opposition militia-cum-cult called the MEK, a group the United States previously considered a terrorist organization but which was feted as an ally against Iran’s government by the Trump administration, today gives briefings about Middle East politics in DC.

When Biden came to power, I hoped that he would follow through on his promises to prioritize diplomacy by returning the United States to the Iran nuclear deal, undoing Trump’s designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization, and lifting the sanctions that had caused the people of Iran so much suffering. But he failed to do so. Instead, over the last year, he has empowered the most violent tendencies in Israel’s government with $22 billion in U.S. taxpayer money for weapons—a figure larger than Iran’s entire annual military budget—and trotted out, almost reflexively, the well-worn language of terror and existential threat to describe Iran while failing to enforce any of its supposed “red lines” on Israel’s military actions across the region.

The United States helped lay the groundwork for these moves through a legal mechanism: the ability to designate organizations as “terrorist groups.” Both Hamas and Hezbollah have been on the list since 1997, when it was created by the Clinton administration as a central part of the U.S. “counter-terror” strategy. But this strategy of lawfare goes back much further, as Maryam Jamshidi has detailed in these pages. At the first-ever conference on “international terrorism” in 1979, Benjamin Netanyahu and his father Benzion argued that terrorism was an ideology that the West could only defeat by operating outside of international law. This was a distinct shift in the word’s meaning: where once, it described the tactic of state or non-state actors using violence against civilians for political aims, it was now specifically associated with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim militancy. Though providing “material support” to terrorist organizations was criminalized in response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by a white nationalist, it was Palestinian groups that ended up becoming the focus of the legal reprisals.

We can see the result of decades of “anti-terrorism” lobbying in HR 9495, a bill recently passed by the House that would allow the Treasury Department to unilaterally decide whether a nonprofit has provided “material support” to terrorism with no access to due process or the evidence against them. As Darryl Li has noted, “the bill’s sponsors have made no secret of their desire to smear certain nonprofits connected with campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza as working at the behest of Hamas,” which would closely connect with the aims of Project Esther, a right-wing plan to bring down the pro-Palestine student movement. Once in power, Trump could wield the “terror” label to stifle dissentfar beyond what we’ve seen on campuses over the last year. Top officials have already saidthey are considering expanding the terrorist label to cartels in Mexico to justify a potential invasion that would potentially open up an Afghanistan-style quagmire on the southern border. It has become a do-it-all tool: one that can crush dissent at home just as easily as it can expand war in every direction abroad.

When some observers argue that Hamas or Hezbollah are evil and should be eliminated by Israel, but that not everyone in Gaza is Hamas nor everyone in Lebanon Hezbollah, they ignore the extent to which both groups are part and parcel of their respective societies—that so many ordinary Palestinians and Lebanese are affiliated with Hamas and Hezbollah. As a Lebanese man living under Israel’s bombardment in Dahiyeh told me in October, “Hezbollah isn’t just a military. It has doctors, nurses, teachers, ambulances. It’s a mini-state. It’s very hard to separate Hezbollah and society.” As scholars have noted regarding both Hamas and Hezbollah, the armed wings of these groups are but one piece of a much larger structure. Similar to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, both organizations emerged in contexts of armed struggle. Both were founded because Israel was occupying their lands, and they see their mission not only as liberating themselves from occupation but also uplifting their communities. They both have thousands of members who carry arms; they also have tens of thousands of more members who have never raised a gun in their lives.

Hamas was founded in the 1980s in response to decades of Israeli rule over Palestinians under which they were forbidden from any form of political organizing including even basic gestures as waving their own flag. It emerged as a major player during the First Intifada, challenging Israel through armed resistance while simultaneously building a network of social care providers to administer to needs in Palestinian society. When Israel was forced to allow for limited Palestinian self-governance in the Oslo Accords, Hamas emerged publicly as a major political party bolstered by its extensive network of social and economic support. Hamas institutions include nursery schools, kindergartens, youth and sports clubs, libraries, day care centers, and nursing homes. Even the garbage collectors are linked to Hamas because Hamas ran Gaza city hall.

Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s to mount a military resistance against Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon. It grew out of an existing network of social services focused on the region, one of Lebanon’s poorest. Fearful that South Lebanon would end up like Palestine or the Syrian Golan Heights—forever occupied, with its inhabitants rendered perpetual second-class citizens in their homeland—Hezbollah’s armed wing fought until finally, in 2000, Israel was forced to withdraw from Lebanon. But its staying power and popularity among its constituents was not just related to its military prowess. Hezbollah runs health services, schools, orphanages, clinics, and other institutions across Lebanon, making up for the virtual absence of the Lebanese state in providing social care. Hezbollah has a microloan bank, a think tank, and institutions to provide for veterans, widows, and orphans. It even has a boy scouts.

Netanyahu knows all this, of course—and it’s why his words ring hollow when he claims that in Iran, his war is not with the people but with the Islamic Republic. This is a far more expanded definition of the target than the IRGC, which is but one branch of Iran’s government. If the Islamic Republic is identified as the enemy, that means all of Iran’s civilian infrastructure—and all of the civilians building it, repairing it, and using it—are potential targets. Iman Vaghefi, a Tehran-based sociologist, recently posted on X:

Today I boarded an Islamic Republic bus. I went to work at a company registered in the Islamic Republic. In the evening, I went to an Islamic Republic university, and at night I returned home, which is the only non-Islamic Republic place. But to be honest, at home, I cook on Islamic Republic gas and I use Islamic Republic electricity.

We saw this line being blurred back in April, when Israel bombed an Iranian embassy in Damascus, killing sixteen people—and triggering Iran’s first direct retaliation against Israel. The excuse for the attack against a diplomatic building, protected under international law, was precisely that the IRGC was using it. Israeli leaders have impliedthat attacking IRGC installations or Islamic Republic institutions could trigger “regime change,” weakening the government enough that Iranians would rise up and overthrow it.

But for years, Israel has launched attacks inside Iran and no such uprising has come. Since the early 2010s, Israel regularly carried out assassinations on Iranian soil, including a 2011 bomb that killed Tehrani Moghaddam along with sixteen others around him. When I lived in Iran from 2018 to 2021, mysterious bombings and explosions in the mountains were a regular occurrence, seemingly part of a Mossad campaign to underscore Iran’s vulnerability and undermine its military. In recent years we’ve seen Israel launch cyberattacks that brought down gasoline stations across the country. These attacks spread a sense of vulnerability among ordinary people—and also just made their lives a little more miserable. Once, I spent a weekend at an idyllic lakeside village outside Tehran. A few weeks later, I woke up to news that a machine gun mounted on a robot drone was used to assassinate a general on that road I had taken to get there.

If Israel were to expand the pressure, the misery would only multiply. Should it do so, it is entirely possible it will pursue this aim the same way it has done in Gaza and Lebanon: setting out to eradicate “terrorism,” and then expanding the category of terrorist to encompass all manner of Iranians, starting with the armed paramilitary force and youth members that make up the Basij’s ranks and eventually encompassing the everyday civilians caught up in between them.

But in many ways, the strategy can also pay dividends without a single bullet being fired. When the Trump administration labeled the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization in 2019, the idea was unprecedented—the first time the country had used the designation against another country’s military. At first, U.S. allies refused to follow suit. But after Iran’s Women Life Freedom feminist movement in 2022, which saw the Guards take harsh retaliatory measures against protestors, right-wing pressure groups outside of Iran—many of them hungry for sanctions and military action—began pushing for other countries to adopt the label. Soon, Iranians inside the country looking for a way to symbolically punish the IRGC latched onto the idea as well.

It’s not surprising that the campaign found fertile ground among Iranians who saw it as revenge against a group they find at best unaccountable to those it claims to serve and at worst an agent of repression allied with state corruption. Most failed to realize, though, that their resentment had been weaponized against them. More than any group, it is Iranian civilians who have felt the sting of U.S. sanctions—shortages of medicine, lost access to banks and financial services, the denial of visas to men who had no choice but to serve their compulsory military service in the IRGC—most acutely. Were the U.S. and Israel to embark on a full-scale military conflict to carry out their aims, the consequences would be graver still.

The sad irony of all of this is that Iran’s government is desperate for a diplomatic opening. President Pezeshkian was elected only months ago on a platform of diplomacy with the world. On a visit to the UN in September, he said Iran would be willing to put aside its weapons to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, with the hope that this could be a first step toward a wider deal between Iran and the United States. With the backing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Pezeshkian has repeatedly reached out his hands to the United States in the hope of a handshake. Israel has not only rejected his entreaties; it has countered with military force designed to scuttle any possibility of a deal. In July, it assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader, in Tehran, only hours after he had attended Pezeshkian’s swearing-in ceremony. This is the action of a rogue state—one that would, no doubt, be labeled a terrorist attack if one of America’s enemies were doing it.