April 8, 2019 — New York
American Jewish Committee (AJC) praised the Trump administration today for designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization.
“Recognition of the IRGC as a key arm of Iran’s global terrorism strategy is vitally important to the U.S., which first designated Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984,” said AJC CEO David Harris. “We applaud President Trump for taking this highly significant step.”
AJC has been calling for many years on successive U.S. administrations to take this necessary, punitive action against the IRGC.
The IRGC, founded soon after the 1979 Islamist revolution in Iran, operates separately from the country’s regular conventional armed forces, and exerts significant influence in Iran’s economy, politics, and foreign policy.
It maintains its own air, land, and naval units, and has been intimately engaged in Syria, supporting the Assad regime’s brutal violence in that country since the internal war began in 2011. It is also heavily involved with supporting Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored terrorist organization, based in Lebanon and responsible for fatal terror attacks against Americans, Israelis, and Jewish communities around the world, notably the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded 300.
President Trump, in his statement. declared that the designation "recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft."
