- State affiliation · Iran
- Vigil category device · not official insignia
Identity provenance
State affiliation: Iran.
Vigil category device — drawn from this record’s own domain, echelon and role. Not an official insignia.
In brief
The Guard ground force's special-operations brigade — established under Mohammad Ali Jafari, by most accounts in 2000, as the Guard's counterpart to the Artesh's airborne special forces; associated in public reporting with operations in the Kurdish north-west and the Baluch south-east, and deployed to Syria from 2015, where its losses were announced at home.
- Scope
- Structure, role, lineage and links. No subordinate records published.
- Subordination
- Subordination reported
- Sources
- 2 on the record
- Record state
- Partial
- Broad area of activity
- Iran's Kurdish north-west and Baluch south-east in the reported domestic operations; Syria from 2015. No location is authored.
- Notable history
- After the Iran–Iraq war the Guard's ground force judged that it needed a formation for difficult operations by land, sea and air, and in 2000 Mohammad Ali Jafari — later commander of the whole Guard — founded Saberin, "the patient ones", drawing volunteers from across the Guard's services and modelling its training, by its own account, on foreign special-forces units. Its first task was the Kurdish insurgency of the north-west, against PJAK along the Iraqi and Turkish borders, and it has since been associated with the long campaign against Jaish al-Adl in Sistan and Baluchestan. From 2014 it was drawn into the Guard's external war: its personnel went to Syria as the Guard escalated alongside the Russian intervention in late 2015, and the deaths of its commanders and members were announced and mourned publicly in Iran in early 2016 — the mechanism through which the deployment became known. It is the Guard's answer to the Artesh's NOHED brigade, and the pair are the clearest instance of the two ground armies duplicating a role.
- Strengths
- Hand-picked volunteers, a domestic counter-insurgency record, and the Guard's willingness to commit it abroad where the Artesh's formation followed only later.
- Limitations
- A structure the sources cannot agree on, losses in Syria that Iran announced but whose scale it did not, and a role that exists partly because the Guard would not leave it to the Artesh. Nothing here describes strength, basing or readiness.
Lineage & institutional history
Sensitivity: Public · structural Confidence: Low Sources: Iranian armed-forces institutional reference · FDD's Long War Journal↗ Methodology Corrections
Assessed as of — 2026-09 Last reviewed — 2026-09-28
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