TEHRAN: They own car factories and construction firms, operate newspaper groups and oil fields and increasingly, serve in parliament or become provincial governors. To supporters, the Revolutionary Guards are the cream of the country’s talent.

To the United States, they are simply terrorists.

Either way, the group formed to safeguard Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution has pushed well beyond its military roots: Current and former members now hold a growing role across the country’s government and economy, sometimes openly, sometimes in shadow.The election of a president two years ago sharply accelerated that influence, recent interviews here suggest — as supporters of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his protege, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sought to consolidate power by putting supporters in key positions, potentially shaping Iran for years to come. “We don’t support it,” said Mohsen Mirdamadi, who leads Iran’s largest pro-reform party, of the Guards’ growing influence across the economy and government. “It can be reversed with a change of government — but slowly.”

Publicly, the Guards now own, or control, numerous companies that receive lucrative, often no-bid government contracts in the oil and gas industry, farming and road and dam construction. Their winning of deals is often announced outright in Tehran newspapers. As one example, the Guards are thought to run a network of unauthorised docks and trading firms importing consumer goods, tariff-free, into Iran, said Mehdi Khalaji, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

That would be a lucrative business in Iran, where Western goods are harder to obtain.

In addition, an Iranian company that manufactures Japanese cars inside Iran is also thought owned by the Guards, said Khalaji.

The Guards have gained a particularly big role in the country’s oil and gas industry in recent years, as the national oil company has signed several contracts with a Guards-operated construction company. Some have been announced publicly, including a US $2 billion deal in 2006 to develop part of the important Pars gas field.

At least 80 former Guard members also are in parliament out of a total of 290 seats, with others serving as mayors and provincial governors. Former Guard commanders also make up about two-thirds of the current Cabinet, according to some estimates, and Ahmadinejad himself is a former Guards commander who went on to Tehran’s mayor before being elected president.

That influence is a far cry from the group’s original roots —founded in 1979 in the revolution’s wake to protect against the US-trained military, at a time when Iran’s new Islamic leaders feared the army might remain loyal to the deposed shah.

The Guards won widespread admiration and even public reverence in the 1980s when they defended Iran from Saddam Hussein’s regime during the long, devastating Iran-Iraq war.

Now numbering about 125,000 members, they report directly to the supreme leader and officially handle internal security.

The United States already puts pressure on US and European banks to do no business with Iranian banks such as Bank Sedarat that the Bush administration believes help finance Guards’ business operations. But the United States is also considering naming the entire group as a foreign terrorist organisation, presumably allowing wider financial crackdowns.

Hardliners within Iran generally both downplay — and defend — the Guards’ role.

Hossein Shariatmadari, a former Guard member himself who is close to Khamenei, now runs the large Kayhan group of newspapers and magazines in Tehran. He said the members’ prominence is understandable because they often have the engineering training and management skills to run many industries.—AP