When the Ayatollah Khomeini arrived in Tehran on a chartered Air France Boeing 747 following the toppling of the Shah of Iran in 1979, he was not a supreme leader.
In the early years following the revolution, he was forced to share power with what he considered to be a blasphemous alliance of secular liberals, nationalists and Marxists.
But nothing bothered him more than the power retained by the country’s traditional armed forces, who he thoroughly (and correctly) distrusted. So he set about creating a counterweight to their power in the shape of ‘a people’s army’, which he called the Islamic Revolutionary
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