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The New Landscape of Counter-Terrorist Financing
(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Ella Rosenberg - The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is no longer merely smuggling pallets of physical cash across the Zagros Mountains; it has constructed a sophisticated, transnational laundering apparatus. The financial architecture utilized by the IRGC to circumvent U.S. sanctions and fund its proxies is a masterclass in layered obfuscation. By the end of 2025, blockchain analytics revealed that IRGC-controlled addresses accounted for 50% of Iran's entire crypto ecosystem, receiving billions in illicit volume. Pakistan has emerged as the critical geographic and financial bridge for this deployment. The IRGC is heavily leveraging established Pakistani money laundering syndicates, entities that historically serviced narcotics cartels and human trafficking rings. The IRGC contracts these syndicates to convert Iranian digital assets into Pakistani rupees or hard Western currency. The writer is an Iran and financial terrorism expert and a senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center.