Janfadaa, Iran’s new civilian force: 31m volunteers, 1,000 battalions
Fereshteh Sadeghi, The Cradle, September 23, 2026 —
For the Islamic Republic, the most durable defense against foreign attack and internal destabilization is a population mobilized far beyond the barracks.
Days before Iran marked the 46th anniversary of the Sacred Defense, the name given to the 1980–1988 war imposed by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein on the newly established Islamic Republic, Tehran hosted a very different kind of military drill. Those taking part were not regular troops, but ordinary Iranian citizens.
Tens of thousands of men and women, young and middle-aged, participated in the Janfadaa-ye Iran (Sacrificing for Iran) exercises on Friday, 18 September. The drill was organized by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Mohammad Rasoulollah Headquarters in Tehran alongside the Basij, the popular volunteer force affiliated with the IRGC. Its commander, Brigadier General Hassan Hassanzadeh, said 500,000 people had registered for the event, while organizers expected at least 313,000 to take part.
The Janfadaayan-e Iran (Sacrificers for Iran) campaign is a popular movement launched in March 2026 in the wake of the 40-day US-Israeli war on Iran. It began as a wartime registry rather than a conventional military formation, offering civilians a direct channel to declare their readiness to serve.
The movement initially sought to identify Iranian volunteers willing and able to assist the armed forces. Once registration began, however, it quickly grew into an event on an unprecedented scale. Campaign officials say more than 31.6 million Iranians have signed up, a figure that surprised even the authorities and was repeatedly highlighted in domestic media.
Supporters of the Islamic Republic in the diaspora have also sought to join, asking how they could register from abroad.
According to Sasan Zare, the spokesman of the Janfadaa campaign, “32 percent of the volunteers are women and the majority of them were below 46 years old.” The armed forces have not officially announced the deployment of Janfadaa volunteers in defensive operations, although volunteers were reportedly used in areas around southern ports and Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf.
A force for the home front
Six months after the campaign’s launch, military planners are considering how to use this vast reserve to defend Iranian cities and towns, especially Tehran, against separatist cells and armed unrest in the event that the US and Israel resume their war on Iran. Such a force would be intended to hold the domestic front while the army and IRGC concentrate on an external assault.
Their calculations are rooted in the January 2026 unrest, when several Iranian cities were hit by violence that Tehran blamed on US and Israeli agents operating alongside anti-government protesters. At the time, Mossad openly urged Iranians to take to the streets.
In a Persian-language post on X, the agency declared: “Go out into the streets together. The time has come. We are with you. Not just from a distance or through words. We are also with you on the ground.”