Since the establishment of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepah Pasdaran) the organization has been involved in economic and military activities, some of them controversial.
Human rights abuses
The IRGC has been known to regularly practice torture and various other human rights abuses in order to suppress internal dissent. In 1993, Ayatollah Khamenei appointed Naghdi as deputy director of intelligence of the Quds Force, a branch of the IRGC responsible for international operations. Naghdi and his team allegedly committed numerous acts of torture and abuse.
Corruption
In 2005, the IRGC was discovered to be running an illegal airport near Karaj, close to Tehran, where they imported and exported goods with no oversight. In 2004, the Pasdaran stormed the newly-built Imam Khomeini International Airport just after it had been officially opened and shut it down, ostensively for security reasons. According to their critics, however, it was shut because the company hired to operate the airport was a "Turkish competitor of a Pasdaran owned business".
One Majlis member stated that IRGC black-market activities might account for $12 billion per year. Yet at the same time, IRGC and Basij forces have been commended for their positive role in fighting illegal smuggling—a further illustration of the institution’s multidimensional and frequently contradictory nature.
Involvement with Hezbollah
The IRGC's logo was inspiration for the logo of Hezbollah. The IRGC provided military training to Hezbollah fighters in the Bekaa Valley during the early eighties.
According to Jane's Information Group: Any Hezbollah member receiving military training is likely to do so at the hands of IRGC [the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps], either in southern Lebanon or in camps in Iran. The increasingly sophisticated methods used by IRGC members indicates that they are trained using Israeli and US military manuals; the emphasis of this training is on the tactics of attrition, mobility, intelligence gathering and night-time manoeuvres.
Involvement with Hamas
According to the New York Times, Hamas fighters are possibly being trained in urban assault tactics by the IRGC.
Alleged involvement in the Iraq War
The United States Department of Defense has repeatedly asserted IRG involvement in the Iraq War against Iranian denials, though the U.S. has stopped short of saying the central government of Iran is responsible for the actions. In May 2008, Iraq said it had no evidence that Iran was supporting militants on Iraqi soil. According to a database compiled by the Multi-National Task Force's Iraq Task Force Troy, Iranian-made weapons accounted for only a negligible percentage of weapon caches found in Iraq. The U.S. charges come as Iran and Turkey have complained that U.S.-supplied guns are flowing from Iraq to anti-government militants on their soil.
The Department has reported that it has intelligence reports of heavy Islamic Revolutionary Guard involvement in Iraq in which the force is supplying Iraqi insurgents. It is further claimed that US soldiers have been killed by Iranian-made or designed explosive devices. This claim is disputed by Iran, saying that the bulk of American military deaths in Iraq are due to a Sunni insurgency and not a Shiite one. Two different studies have maintained that approximately half of all foreign insurgents entering Iraq come from Saudi Arabia. Iran further disputes that former Iraqi army personnel, whom, prior to the 2003 invasion, the US and UK claimed were capable of deploying advanced missile systems capable of launching WMDs within 45 minutes, would be incapable of designing and producing improvised explosive devices.