WASHINGTON, Aug 15: The Bush administration reportedly is about to add Iran's Revolutionary Guard to a “specially-designated global terrorist” list.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has close ties to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the top echelon of his regime.

Citing unnamed US officials, the Washington Post and New York Times reported that the administration is about to crack down on the IRGC. Designation under the post-9/11 executive order 13224 cuts off organisations and individuals from the US financial system and authorises the administration to freeze its financial assets.

The US government can also confiscate assets of those who provide support to such groups and their subsidiaries, front organisations, agents and associates.

Those blacklisted in recent years include Al Qaeda-affiliated groups and individuals in Libya and Southeast Asia, Saudi “charities” in Indonesia and the Philippines, radicals operating in the tri-border region between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and — just this week — the Lebanon-based Islamist group, Fatah al-Islam.

If the terrorist designation of the IRGC goes ahead it will, significantly, target an agency of a foreign government.

US Iran experts claim that the Iranian government is using subsidiaries associated with the IRGC to protect some oil projects from possible UN-backed sanctions.

The IRGC, also known as the Pasdaran was set up as the “guardian of the Islamic Revolution” after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Three years later, a 1,500-strong IGRC force was sent to Lebanon, where it oversaw the establishment of Hezbollah, the terrorist group that the following year was the principal suspect in deadly bombings of the US Embassy and US Marines barracks in Beirut.

Over the past decade and more, that State Department's annual reports on global terrorism have consistently reported on Iran's key involvement in state-sponsored terror.

Washington links the IRGC, estimated to be 120,000-125,000-strong, to much of that activity. They claim that its corps Quds Force oversees terrorism abroad.

Recently, US officials also have begun to link the IRGC to anti-US violence in Iraq.

In the State Department's annual terrorism reports covering 2005 and 2006, the IRGC is accused of supplying lethal assistance, including armour-piercing explosives, to Iraqi militant groups fighting US forces.

US military experts blame the IRGC for supply Explosively Formed Penetrators to anti-US groups in Iraq.

Armour-penetrating EFPs are a particularly effective type of improvised explosive device — a shaped charge capable of penetrating most armour used by coalition forces in Iraq, with deadly results.