They lie where they fell. Young men and women. Faces split by batons, skulls crushed by rifle butts, shirts soaked dark with blood already drying in the winter air.
One body is twisted at an angle that no functioning spine could tolerate. Another stares upward, eyes open, mouth frozen as if still trying to shout.
Around them, pools of red mark the asphalt where this week the Islamic Republic’s security forces – mainly comprising its loathsome Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – have once again done what they were founded to do after the 1979 revolution: crush Iranians who dare to demand a future not ruled by clerics, fear and guns.
In protest after protest – in 2009, 2019, 2022, after the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for not complying with the country’s Islamic dress code and again now – Iranians are shot, beaten, tortured and disappeared. Thousands are arrested and hundreds killed.
The IRGC, established by the ayatollahs to uphold and enforce theocracy, and its wretched volunteer militia the Basij auxiliaries, act as judge, jury and executioner.
For years, Britain has dithered over proscribing the IRGC. We sanction individuals. We express ‘grave concern’ and, most excruciatingly of all, we urge ‘de-escalation’.
But we stop short of the one step that would signal moral and political clarity: formally designating the IRGC as a terrorist organisation under British law.
The argument from the Foreign Office has been depressingly consistent. We are told that we must ‘maintain lines of communication’ and that proscription would be ‘escalatory’.
We are informed it would limit Britain’s diplomatic flexibility, that it would make it harder to deal with Iran on nuclear issues, regional stability or the release of detained dual nationals.
Once, I had some sympathy with this logic. I could persuade myself the Islamic Republic might be reformed and that engagement might empower ‘pragmatists’. That time has passed.
As crowds gather across the world in solidarity with the Iranians hunted by their own state, waving the ‘lion and sun’ pre-revolutionary Iranian flag and chanting for freedom, there is another, more sinister spectacle outside Iran, too.
This week, there were reports of crowds gathering in central London outside Kilburn Mosque in northwest London, roaring their support for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, wearing balaclavas and dressed in black, cosplaying as Isis and Hamas in a mix of homegrown Islamists and dictator fetishists, as the police watched on.
It was no surprise to me. About 18 months ago, I and the immensely brave British-Iranian activist Kasra Aarabi, director of the campaign group United Against Nuclear Iran, took a tour around what I christened Britain’s ‘Little Tehran’.
It is a knot of institutions in central London that function as an extension of the Islamic Republic’s ideological and political apparatus over here.
In one of them, the School of the Islamic Republic of Iran, footage has emerged of children as young as eight singing an IRGC-linked anthem and pledging loyalty to Khamenei. Some of the institutions enjoy charitable status and have even received public funds.
This is not abstract influence or distant extremism: it is the Iranian regime operating in plain sight on British streets.
Under the protection of British law, people rally in support of a theocracy whose security services shoot teenagers for chanting, whose prisons rape and torture, and whose judges sign death warrants after five-minute trials.
The IRGC is sanctioned across much of the Western world – except Britain. This is not simply a foreign policy issue. It is a national issue. And it is a political failure.
The IRGC is more than a military force. It is the backbone of the Islamic Republic’s system of control. It commands the Basij, who club and shoot protesters.
It runs the intelligence units that kidnap dissidents. It runs proxy armies across the Middle East: Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen and networks in Syria and Gaza.
It whacks its enemies on European soil, too. It threatens journalists, activists and former officials living under UK protection. And it has tried to kill British and dual-national citizens on our soil, including the stabbing of Iranian TV journalist Pouria Zeraati in March 2024.
The US President may not appear to have a great grasp of global affairs, but Donald Trump’s administration designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) in April 2019.
Trump recognises it for what it is: not merely a branch of a state military, but a transnational ideological army that runs militias, terror networks, assassination plots and repression – both at home and abroad.
Sadly, this truth has escaped large parts of the British political class and the big grey blob of EU technocrats that has congealed for decades in Brussels, wittering endlessly and acting rarely. Both still behave as if the problem is a misunderstanding or insufficient dialogue, rather than the nature of the institution itself.
But to pretend that this organisation can be treated as a conventional state actor is wilful self-deception.
And the cost of that deception is not abstract. It is paid in Iranian blood – and in the corrosion of our own security at home.
When regime-linked institutions operate freely in Britain, when their supporters mobilise openly, when their front organisations enjoy charitable status and public legitimacy, we are not being tolerant. We are being indefensibly negligent.
This is not about Islam. It is about radical Islamism, a political ideology that fuses totalitarian theocracy with coercive power – and the IRGC is one of its most sophisticated and ruthless instruments.
Our long-standing reluctance to confront Islamism in its most organised, state-backed form has left us intellectually and institutionally disarmed.
We are so fearful of appearing ‘illiberal’ that we hesitate to defend liberal society against those who openly reject it.
Proscribing the IRGC wouldn’t necessarily solve everything. Intelligence sources argue that IRGC threats are already covered by terrorism and national security laws, while chasing online sympathisers achieves little. Proscription therefore becomes a symbolic act that buys diplomatic trouble without delivering meaningful security gains.
Proscribing it would, however, criminalise support, funding and organisational activity linked to it in Britain. It would give law enforcement and intelligence agencies sharper tools to go after its assets and agents of influence. It would send a message to Tehran that the age of appeasement is over.
And, most of all, it would tell Iranians risking their lives in the streets that Britain stands with them not just in words but in law.
Solidarity is not a slogan, it is a policy.
If we truly believe in national security and opposing terrorism, we must proscribe the IRGC.
If we truly believe in confronting virulent forms of Islamism, at home and abroad, then we simply have no other choice.
The decision is no longer engagement or isolation; it is a choice between allowing a brutal theocratic security state to do its worst or standing up for those lying bloodied on the asphalt whose only crime is that they dared to say: enough.
