How Does Iran’s Regime Forge the Loyalty of Its Elite Forces?

Omid, a pseudonym used because his real name cannot be published, signed up to join Iran’s security forces when he was 18. At the time, he had a “deep commitment to serving the country”. At the academy, Omid told DW, cadets were monitored “day and night”, from military training to prayers and daily sermons.

“They try to dictate the mindset of young cadets,” Omid said.

According to Omid, some recruits eventually climb the ranks of Iran’s security apparatus and join an elite circle of officers who plan operations inside and outside the country, with access to unlimited resources and personnel. He said he had been invited to attend closed-door meetings of this kind.

A defector’s testimony

When Omid—a muscular man with scars accumulated over decades of service as a commander in Iran’s elite special forces—contacted DW in early 2026, a number of questions arose. Could he have been sent to feed DW misinformation and lies to discredit the German broadcaster, whose Farsi-language service is officially banned in Iran? Could he be trying to harm DW or its Iranian staff?

For months, journalists from DW’s investigative unit and Persian department corresponded with Omid. He shared notes and photographs of his training, which included sniper practice and surveillance, as well as urban combat, riot control and parachuting. He also provided photographs, videos and documents, as well as the location of a secret monitoring centre and a residential complex reserved for senior members of Iran’s security forces.

He said a group of senior officers operating in secret, united by absolute loyalty to Iran’s supreme leader, planned and carried out killings and abductions of opponents of the regime.

Omid’s testimony offers a rare glimpse into Iran’s powerful but secretive security apparatus and the lives of those at the heart of the Islamic Republic. It has enabled DW to piece together how the regime maintains highly loyal forces despite major waves of protests, international sanctions, rising inflation and recent attacks by its two main adversaries, Israel and the United States, which killed many senior military and political figures.

DW verified much of Omid’s account through documents, photographs, videos and interviews with experts. An intermediary introduced the investigative team to another senior defector, whose testimony corroborated several important details of Omid’s account. DW has confirmed the identities of both men but is withholding certain information to protect them and their families.

Iran has previously pursued dissidents and opposition activists abroad, including journalists.

DW asked the Iranian Embassy in Berlin and the Office of Iran’s Supreme Leader to respond to its findings. The Supreme Leader’s office did not reply.

The Iranian Embassy in Berlin declined to address the allegations in detail. It said that “the Islamic Republic of Iran firmly rejects these allegations and the conclusions drawn from them”.

Prayers and privileges

As a senior member of the special forces, Omid enjoyed various privileges often granted by the regime to its own people. These included financial incentives and lucrative business contracts, as well as a dedicated residential complex with its own mosque, school and hospital. Private satellite dishes were banned in the complex, and religious observance was compulsory.

But, according to Omid, these privileges came at a price: “control, nothing but control”. Officers were closely monitored. “You can’t just go to a wedding or travel,” he said. “Your passport is confiscated; they even decide which schools your children can attend.”

The monitoring also extended to soldiers’ prospective spouses, who were vetted by the regime. Even after he married, Omid said, he was not allowed to tell his wife what his job really was. It “really eats away at you”, he said.

By separating such agents from Iranian society at large, the regime can keep a tighter watch on its forces, said Saeid Golkar, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee who has extensively researched the Islamic Republic’s security command structure.

“They can create peer pressure and indoctrinate much more effectively,” Golkar told DW.

Golkar added that security forces kept largely apart from the public were also more likely to use violence against fellow Iranian civilians without hesitation.

A defector from Iran’s intelligence service

A month after DW began communicating with Omid, an intermediary put the team in touch with another senior defector. The man, whom we call Reza, worked for the Ministry of Intelligence, Iran’s intelligence agency.

Like many recruits to the security apparatus, Reza came from a religious family. He grinned as he showed DW a photograph on his mobile phone: a younger version of himself, with a long beard and the turban commonly worn by devout Iranians.

He said many of his relatives still held important positions in the Iranian regime.

In his early years, he was a staunch supporter of the regime. He sometimes wept while praying because he felt he was serving his people and the Islamic Republic, and might even “die a martyr for Islam”, he said.

Reza said he gradually turned against the regime after witnessing its crackdowns on protesters. For years, security forces have shot, arrested and beaten Iranians protesting worsening living conditions and the country’s strict “morality” laws.

His hair is now cut short.

“Serving a brutal system”

On the night of 8 January, amid an almost complete internet blackout, security forces opened fire on Iranians protesting widespread shortages and soaring inflation. The scale of the massacre gradually emerged as images documenting the regime’s atrocities began to leave the country.

Thousands of protesters were killed across Iran. Omid and Reza said the mass killings horrified them. Human rights organisations reported that the victims included unarmed protesters shot while lying in hospital beds.

The ongoing brutality was ultimately what prompted them to speak to DW.

Omid insisted that he had never fired on protesters or ordered his subordinates to do so, although DW could not verify this claim.

When pressed, he acknowledged that he had witnessed protesters being killed.

Reza said his guilt over having “wasted 10, 11 years serving a brutal system” had compelled him to speak out, despite the danger to himself and his family.

“The fact is, when your opponent is a regime that has no moral values, you have to be prepared for anything,” he said.

Surveillance and repression

Omid and Reza described secret command centres that served as key hubs for suppressing protests. Senior officials from various units and agencies gathered in a monitoring room. According to the two men, giant wall screens displayed live feeds from countless CCTV cameras across Tehran, Iran’s capital. They said similar rooms existed in other regions.

Protest marches were also monitored from the air using drones. Reza said: “Information from forces on the ground, from Twitter, Telegram and other social networks, as well as information obtained through surveillance and interception equipment—all of it is brought together there.”

Plain-clothes agents often infiltrated protest groups. According to Omid, they were sometimes used to divert marches towards locations where security forces were waiting.

A representative of Iran’s supreme leader, Omid said, had “complete freedom” to order operations from inside the command centre and decide “how harshly the protesters should be dealt with”.

When regular police could no longer disperse demonstrations, Omid and Reza said, elite units from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the police were deployed to complete the crackdown. Personnel often dressed entirely in black and covered their faces with balaclavas.

Human rights organisations have documented the use of automatic and semi-automatic machine guns, and even heavy machine guns mounted on pick-up trucks, to crush protests.

“The fact that security forces are armed with military-grade firearms designed for combat situations, but used against demonstrations, indicates that the killing of protesters in this country is deliberate,” said Raha Bahreini, Amnesty International’s Iran researcher.

Bahreini authored a recent report analysing the regime’s chain of command during the 2022 protests, following the death in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini.

Dakhme, a “killing machine”

After months of correspondence, Omid showed DW a site in Shahr-e Rey, on the outskirts of Tehran, that looked ordinary from the outside: a prayer room wedged between an occupational therapy clinic and a pharmacy. The room was called Beit al Shohada, or House of the Martyrs. But, according to Omid, many officers called it Dakhme, meaning a burial chamber or tomb.

Omid explained that senior officers gathered beneath the building’s corrugated iron roof to plan operations outside official procedures and government structures. He said he had attended several meetings there, “where decisions about killings are made: this is a killing machine”.

Omid repeatedly insisted that he attended the meetings only because his superiors ordered him to and that he had never been involved in any operation planned at Dakhme. However, he cited several killings and abductions inside and outside Iran that he said had been planned there. DW could not verify those cases, but found that some of the people named had died in circumstances that remain unexplained.

Some experts contacted by DW knew of Dakhme in connection with an attempted assassination of an adviser to a reformist president more than two decades ago. Other experts had never heard of the site. None of those interviewed by DW could confirm whether the facility is still operating.

Experts agreed that the existence of a facility such as Dakhme was plausible. “The Islamic Republic probably feels an increasing need for groups like these now,” said Miad Maleki, a former US Treasury official who until recently designed US sanctions programmes against Iran.

Maleki added that secretly planned military operations at Dakhme could allow the regime to plausibly deny involvement if a killing took place.

Religious and ruthless

Because of the secrecy surrounding Dakhme, most of the following account is based solely on Omid’s testimony and a small number of images obtained by DW of religious ceremonies inside the building.

According to Omid, secret meetings usually began under the cover of religious ceremonies and rituals. They took place in a large hall often decorated with green curtains and religious banners. After a shared dinner, only members of the inner circle remained.

Those who stayed handed over their mobile phones to be kept in a locked place. Then, Omid said, “experienced specialists from Iran’s special forces and intelligence operations” discussed killings and abductions late into the night.

“For these people, a person’s position does not matter much,” Omid said. “If they consider someone a threat to the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, they take it very seriously and take action.”

After each operation, Omid said, the men returned to their respective roles in Iran’s security apparatus until it was time to gather again and defend the Islamic Republic by any means.