Iran forces crack down on protesters

TEHRAN, July 21 (UPI) -- Iranian security forces clamped down on a crowd gathering in a Tehran square Tuesday, observers said.

CNN said there were arrests and some clashes with police Tuesday evening, but their extent was unknown.

Protesters have been demonstrating since the June 12 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a process demonstrators called fraudulent.

Iran's police chief, Brig. Gen. Esmail Ahmadi-Moqaddam, said Tuesday law enforcement would stand firm in the face of the demonstrations. "Some people who failed to reach their goals in the election are creating doubts in different ways, and then turn these doubts into sedition," he said, Iran's government-backed Press TV reported, CNN said.

Tuesday also marked the anniversary of 1952 demonstrations supporting democratically elected former Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who was ousted in a CIA coup the next year, CNN said.

Meanwhile, analysts said Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has grown from a militia force to a vast military-based conglomerate that effectively runs the country.

As dissension racked Iran's political and religious elites over the protests against the results of the June 12 presidential election, it was the hard-line corps that led the violent anti-demonstrator crackdowns and emerged as the ultimate power within the country in a sort of military coup, The New York Times reported.

"It is not a theocracy anymore," RAND Corporation Iran expert Rasool Nafisi told the newspaper. "It is a regular military security government with a facade of a Shiite clerical system."

The Revolutionary Guards Corps has developed from the student-led vanguard of the 1979 Iranian Revolution into a military powerhouse that controls Iran's missiles, oversees its nuclear efforts and operates a multibillion-dollar business empire extends into nearly every economic sector, the newspaper said.

The corps' influence in society rose greatly with the ascension of Ahmadinejad in 2005.