As Obama makes nice to Iran, Iran's Revolutionary Guards risk their lives in outspoken opposition and flee to Turkey for refuge

Video of strife in Iran: http://gu.com/p/2hhkk

Six months ago Muhammed Hussein Torkaman was a young Revolutionary Guard in Iran, working in the security team attached to the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

As part of this inner security force, the Sar-Allah, or Avengers of God, he was also responsible, he says, for the leaders' personal safety during the protests after the presidential elections, which were widely viewed as having been stolen by Ahmadinejad.

He witnessed increasing dissent within the guards. "We have Revolutionary Guards who defied orders, though they were severely punished, expelled from the force and taken to prison," he says.

Torkaman, 24, is in hiding in a small, nondescript flat in a backwater in central Turkey, where he is seeking asylum with his wife and two-year-old son. His extraordinary account of the depravities of the Iranian government and its crushing of dissent forms the backbone of a film by Guardian Films and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The film features the testimony of four former Revolutionary Guards, and reveals the extent of the disillusionment and division within the ranks. Most significantly, perhaps, it provides evidence that sections of the Revolutionary Guard – a core part of the regime, which controls both the nuclear programme and huge swaths of the economy – are angry with the very leaders they have been traditionally prepared to die for.

Iran's ban on foreign journalists makes it difficult to verify Torkaman's claims of defections and resignations from the Revolutionary Guards in the face of the Iranian government's "reign of terror against its own people".

But his description of the brutal mechanics of the regime, and the impact of recent repression on the guards, fits with reports that have come out of the country since the election.

Torkaman admits playing a part in crushing the opposition in the aftermath of the contested election, but he says that he could no longer live with it and fled for Turkey in January.

"I want people outside to know what is happening and what this regime is doing to them – this has to start from somewhere," he says. Despite the regime's description of the country as an Islamic republic, "God does not exist in Iran right now."