There is a pattern of the IRGC mixing civilian and military assets - making civilian casualties almost inevitable ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, March 30, 2026

There is a pattern of the IRGC mixing civilian and military assets - making civilian casualties almost inevitable

On February 28, the first day of the US-Israel campaign against Iran, American forces struck what intelligence maps showed as IRGC facilities in two southern Iranian cities. Both strikes hit civilian structures that had been converted from military use a decade earlier and were no longer legitimate targets. The deaths — 175 in Minab, at least 21 in Lamerd — were tragedies. The US military has acknowledged investigating both as apparent targeting failures driven by outdated intelligence.

But the outrage directed exclusively at the United States is obscuring a harder question: how did two active IRGC compounds come to have schools and volleyball training halls embedded within their original perimeters in the first place?

Lamerd compound with sports hall

The New York Times visual investigation claims that a US Precision Strike Missile — a weapon making its combat debut — struck a sports hall in Lamerd, killing at least 21 people, including children at volleyball practice. An active IRGC compound sits directly adjacent to both structures. Satellite imagery shows the civilian facilities have been walled off from the compound for at least fifteen years.

As I analyzed after the Minab strike, that school had an identical history: originally built inside an IRGC naval compound, physically separated by a fence around 2016, but still architecturally and logistically part of the same rectangular installation. The school was built to serve the children of IRGC personnel. Every building hit on the first day of the war — school, clinic, military complex — had been IRGC property in the not-too-distant past. The US was working from outdated maps that reflected this older reality.

That's a serious US military failure. It's not, however, the only story here.

International humanitarian law prohibits using civilians as shields for military assets. The IRGC and its proxies have a well-documented record of this in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza — positioning missile stockpiles in apartment buildings, running command centers beneath hospitals, storing weapons in schools. The intent is to deter strikes by raising the civilian cost, and to generate propaganda when civilians die anyway.

Minab compound with school and clinic

What happened at Lamerd and Minab is structurally different, and in some ways more troubling. The IRGC didn't move military assets into a civilian neighborhood. It converted buildings within its own military compound into civilian use — a school, a clinic, a sports hall — while keeping the compound's core military function active. The civilian population moved toward the military target, rather than the reverse.

The practical effect under IHL is the same: civilians die near legitimate military objectives. But the mechanism creates a distinct problem. In classic human shielding, a military actor makes a deliberate, visible choice to co-locate with protected persons — a choice that can at least theoretically be documented and condemned. In the IRGC model, the ambiguity is baked in structurally over years, through civilian-use conversions that look, on paper, like benign community development. The IRGC runs schools and clinics as part of its vast socioeconomic empire anyway. No one needs to issue a cynical order to "put a school next to the missile base." The school was always going to be next to the missile base because the IRGC is simultaneously the missile base and the community institution that builds schools.

This brings us to a point that has gone almost entirely unaddressed in the coverage. The United States designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in April 2019 — the first time in history that a component of a foreign government received that designation. The EU followed suit on January 29, 2026, less than a month before the February 28 strikes. Both designations rest on the same finding: the IRGC doesn't merely support terrorism as a policy instrument — terrorism is foundational and institutional to what it is.

This designation has a structural implication that Western media analysis habitually ignores. When an organization is designated a terrorist entity in its entirety, the normal civilian/military distinction that IHL assumes — two separate categories, with a bright line between them — ceases to apply in the way international law imagines. The IRGC runs construction companies, schools, clinics, sports facilities, housing developments, and one of the largest parallel economies in Iran. It does all of this not as a separate "civilian wing" but as the same organization that builds ballistic missiles and directs proxy terrorist networks across the Middle East. There is no internal wall.

Iran's primary proxy provides the clearest articulation of this doctrine in its own words. For years, Western governments — particularly in Europe — tried to distinguish between Hezbollah's "military wing" and its "political wing," sanctioning the former while engaging the latter. Hezbollah's leadership found this transparently absurd and said so repeatedly.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called the military/political distinction an innovation — using the Islamic legal term bid'a, meaning an illegitimate departure from established practice — and stated that sanctioning only the military wing would have no practical effects, because Hezbollah had no such internal divisions. His deputy and current head of the organization Naim Qassem was more direct: "In Lebanon there is one Hezbollah, named Hezbollah. We don't have a military wing and a political wing." In 2013, Nasrallah mocked the British government specifically, saying the military/political distinction was "the work of the British" and sarcastically proposing that Lebanon's next government ministers should come from "the military wing."

Hezbollah is explicitly doing what Iran tells it to do. The organizational logic Nasrallah described — no internal separation between military and civilian functions, a single leadership council overseeing everything from parliamentary activity to armed operations — is the IRGC model exported. And it's not a coincidence that IRGC compounds in Iran look the same way from the outside: a school here, a clinic there, an intelligence headquarters in the center, all originally part of the same perimeter.

To be precise about the legal implications: none of this made the Minab school or the Lamerd sports hall legitimate targets. Civilian facilities are protected under the laws of armed conflict regardless of their history or proximity to military objectives. The US military's use of maps that hadn't been updated in a decade to reflect these conversions appears to be a failure of the precautionary measures IHL requires before striking. But we cannot dismiss out of hand that parts of the "civilian" structures may have also used for military purposes, the way Hamas took over sections of hospitals. Those investigations should proceed without political interference.

What IHL does say — and what has been almost entirely absent from the coverage — is that parties to a conflict are prohibited from placing military objectives in the vicinity of civilian objects, or using the presence of civilians to shield military sites from attack. The IRGC's pattern of building civilian facilities inside active military compounds, for the families of military personnel, within the same rectangular perimeter, with the same organizational structure that explicitly rejects any civilian/military distinction, is a textbook implementation of this prohibited practice — just executed slowly, structurally, and years in advance rather than on the eve of a strike.

The tragedy at Minab and Lamerd is that the IRGC's long-term strategy of deliberate ambiguity worked exactly as designed.

By the way, the wall to wall reporting of the Minab school as being a "girls school" and of killing "175 girls" was all Iranian propaganda. It was a school for both boys and girls being taught on different floors; more boys were killed than girls and many adults were killed, possibly from the adjoining IRGC facilities but added to the total casualty count. . It is a small but telling example of how the media swallows and repeats information from known liars. Even a relatively small detail like this must be independently checked by journalists and never believed when coming from those with a track record of lying.