Thank you.

For over four decades, the Islamic regime in Iran has founded and aggressively supported terrorism and terrorist organizations in the Middle East and defied international norms by conducting these terrorist activities, with global repercussions.

The roots of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, go back to the 1979 anti-status quo revolution in Iran, when a number of paramilitary terrorist groups merged to assume the role of enforcer of the new regime. They targeted activists, rival political factions and ethnic and religious minorities in line with the regime's monopolism and suppressive behaviour.

This role of protecting the revolution and its achievements was inked into the new Iranian constitution's article 150. In fact, according to the second charter of the IRGC, published in 1982, the revolutionary guard's main agenda is not only to safeguard the Islamic revolution and its achievements but also to continuously work toward realizing God's will and expanding the rule of God as interpreted by the supreme revolutionary leader and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

The IRGC is one of the very few military forces in the world, and perhaps the only one, that claims a direct connection with the Almighty through its chain of command. Throughout the 1980s and the Iran-Iraq War, the IRGC grew into separate forces—ground forces, navy and air forces, Basij, and the Quds Force, the expeditionary branch of the IRGC.

The Quds Force has repeatedly been targeted with sanctions for its active role in supporting and leading terrorist organizations in recent years, but the Quds Force is only one part of the whole. It is often boosted by other branches of the IRGC and answers directly to the highest levels of the chain of command in Iran.

After spending almost a decade expanding both its defensive and offensive powers, in the early 2000s, the IRGC shifted its attention to fighting the United States and the west in general, which were, by then, engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to defeating its self-declared enemy, the state of Israel. By following one of the basic principles of warfare, the economy of force, which means judicious employment and distribution of forces, Iran created and managed a network of proxy militant groups to do most of the fighting and dying for it.

Iran has also increasingly relied on criminal gangs in target countries to target Iranian dissidents and journalists. The IRGC also has a powerful intelligence arm, the intelligence organization, with extraordinary powers, undeclared prisons and a notorious reputation for locking up, torturing and raping political opponents. The IRGC's intelligence organization has a foreign operations branch, and it's especially involved in targeting foreign and Iranian citizens in countries like Turkey, and as a result was designated last year by the U.S. Treasury.

The IRGC is by design an anti-status quo, ideological international force that seeks to alter regional and also international balances of power. Its extraterritorial role makes IRGC one of the main tools of the regime's state-sponsored terrorism beside the intelligence ministry. State-sponsored or directed terrorism is generally defined as government support or control of acts of international terrorism, usually by violent non-state actors with funding, training, hosting, directing and supplying weapons to them. Those definitions rarely include a state that commits acts of terrorism all by itself in a systematic manner.

The IRGC does have such quality in the form of its Quds Force, the same extraterritorial arm. Therefore, international terrorism is not a problem isolated to non-state actors or certain regions; it is a global problem, and so is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC. The IRGC has also quickly gone to work to export the revolution by supporting guerrilla movements around the world.

Also, when the devastating Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, the IRGC played a very key role in prolonging it. The IRGC expanded exponentially both as a conventional military organization but also as a force to safeguard Islam and export their revolution.

The U.S. Department of State has designated and sanctioned four countries—Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria—as ones that have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism pursuant to three specific laws.

Under Iran, in April 2019 the State Department designated the IRGC as instrumental in founding, training and supplying Hezbollah, a group designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department, and also by the Canadian government, in 2002.

While the Canadian government mainly sees the threat of terrorism originating from the three main components—violent Sunni Islamist extremism, both at home and abroad; international terrorist groups; and domestic issue-based extremism—it also admits to the changing nature of the terrorist threat facing Canada. It is now time to broaden this definition and clearly include state terrorism conducted directly by its main element of power.

Thank you very much.

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