IRGC to reopen its own high schools

Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, the deputy chief commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said in a commemoration of the martyrs of the Sepah High School that “the issue of the reopening of IRGC high schools is now part of the agenda; the fate of the plan to reopen the IRGC high schools that have been closed for a decade will become clear after the conclusion of the necessary studies and professional reviews.”

The IRGC is not only looking to prepare military forces, but through the founding of high schools and colleges associated with the organization plans on educating a class of faithful and effective forces that follow the IRGC ideology. Sepah (IRGC) founded the first of these schools, a high school, in 1361 (1982). This high school was founded by Commanders Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr and Seyed Jamal Aldin Dinparvar, the heads of IRGC’s educational division, to educate a loyal cadre and future devoted forces.

This high school was in Tehran, set on the premises of the former embassy of the United States. However, to extend the mission to attract and educate more forces, high schools also were opened in other cities. The focus was on large cities, as well as the areas where the IRGC lacked local forces, in cities such as Tabriz, Urmiyeh, Kerman, Sanandaj, Zahedan, Shiraz, Rasht, Yasuj and Bandar-e Abbas. The IRGC, as such, is among the most pioneering organizations in the training of loyal forces from the middle school level onward.

In the 1980s, due to the needs of the Iran-Iraq war and the requirement to train fighting forces for the war front, the students were mostly trained as soldiers of the IRGC (“pasdar”) and were sent to the war zones. However, after the end of the war, while some still entered the rank and file, others were sent to become part of the administrative units and officers in the IRGC-related colleges such as Malek-e Ashtar, Defense Sciences and Technology College and Emam-Sadeq University.