Terrorists, cultists – or champions of Iranian
democracy? The wild wild story of the MEK
They fought for the Iranian revolution – and then
for Saddam Hussein. The US and UK once condemned
them. But now their opposition to Tehran has made
them favourites of Trump White House hardliners. By Arron Merat
Fri 9 Nov 2018 06.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/09/mek-iran-revolution-regime-trump-rajavi
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=178072#178072
Mostafa and Robabe Mohammadi came to Albania to
rescue their daughter. But in Tirana, the
capital, the middle-aged couple have been
followed everywhere by two Albanian intelligence
agents. Men in sunglasses trailed them from their
hotel on George W Bush Road to their lawyer’s
office; from the lawyer’s office to the ministry
of internal affairs; and from the ministry back to the hotel.
The Mohammadis say their daughter, Somayeh, is
being held against her will by a fringe Iranian
revolutionary group that has been exiled to
Albania, known as the People’s Mujahedin of Iran,
or MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Widely regarded as a
cult, the MEK was once designated as a terrorist
organisation by the US and UK, but its opposition
to the Iranian government has now earned it the
support of powerful hawks in the Trump
administration, including national security
adviser John Bolton and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.
Somayeh Mohammadi is one of about 2,300 members
of the MEK living inside a heavily fortified base
that has been built on 34 hectares of farmland in
north-west Albania. Her parents, who were once
supporters of the group, say that 21 years ago,
Somayeh flew to Iraq to attend a summer camp and
to visit her maternal aunt’s grave. She never came back.
The couple have spent the past two decades trying
to get their daughter out of the MEK, travelling
from their home in Canada to Paris, Jordan, Iraq
and now Albania. “We are not against any group or
any country,” Mostafa said, sitting outside a
meatball restaurant in central Tirana. “We just
want to see our daughter outside the camp and
without her commanders. She can choose to stay or
she can choose to come home with us.” The MEK
insists Somayeh does not wish to leave the camp,
and has released a letter in which she accuses
her father of working for Iranian intelligence.
“Somayeh is a shy girl,” her mother said. “They
threaten people like her. She wants to leave but
she is scared that they will kill her.”
Since its exile from Iran in the early 1980s, the
MEK has been committed to the overthrow of the
Islamic republic. But it began in the 1960s as an
Islamist-Marxist student militia, which played a
decisive role in helping to topple the Shah during the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and
anti-American, MEK fighters killed scores of the
Shah’s police in often suicidal street battles
during the 1970s. The group targeted US-owned
hotels, airlines and oil companies, and was
responsible for the deaths of six Americans in
Iran. “Death to America by blood and bonfire on
the lips of every Muslim is the cry of the
Iranian people,” went one of its most famous
songs. “May America be annihilated.”
Such attacks helped pave the way for the return
of the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who
quickly identified the MEK as a serious threat to
his plan to turn Iran into an Islamic republic
under the control of the clergy. The well-armed
middle-class guerrillas, although popular among
religious students and intellectuals, would prove
to be no match for Khomeini’s organisation and ruthlessness.
Following the revolution, Khomeini used the
security services, the courts and the media to
choke off the MEK’s political support and then
crush it entirely. After it fought back, killing
more than 70 senior leaders of the Islamic
republic – including the president and Iran’s
chief justice – in audacious bomb attacks,
Khomeini ordered a violent crackdown on MEK
members and sympathisers. The survivors fled the country.
Saddam Hussein, who was fighting a bloody war
against Iran with the backing of the UK and the
US, saw an opportunity to deploy the exiled MEK
fighters against the Islamic republic. In 1986,
he offered the group weapons, cash and a vast
military base named Camp Ashraf, only 50 miles from the border with Iran.
For almost two decades, under their embittered
leader Massoud Rajavi, the MEK staged attacks
against civilian and military targets across the
border in Iran and helped Saddam suppress his own
domestic enemies. But after siding with Saddam –
who indiscriminately bombed Iranian cities and
routinely used chemical weapons in a war that
cost a million lives – the MEK lost nearly all
the support it had retained inside Iran. Members
were now widely regarded as traitors.
Isolated inside its Iraqi base, under Rajavi’s
tightening grip, the MEK became cult-like. A
report commissioned by the US government, based
on interviews within Camp Ashraf, later concluded
that the MEK had “many of the typical
characteristics of a cult, such as authoritarian
control, confiscation of assets, sexual control
(including mandatory divorce and celibacy),
emotional isolation, forced labour, sleep
deprivation, physical abuse and limited exit options”.
After the US invasion of Iraq, the MEK launched a
lavish lobbying campaign to reverse its
designation as a terrorist organisation – despite
reports implicating the group in assassinations
of Iranian nuclear scientists as recently as
2012. Rajavi has not been seen since 2003 – most
analysts assume he is dead – but under the
leadership of his wife, Maryam Rajavi, the MEK
has won considerable support from sections of the
US and European right, eager for allies in the fight against Tehran.
In 2009, the UK delisted the MEK as a terror
group. The Obama administration removed the group
from the US terror list in 2012, and later helped
negotiate its relocation to Albania.
At the annual “Free Iran” conference that the
group stages in Paris each summer, dozens of
elected US and UK representatives – along with
retired politicians and military officials –
openly call for the overthrow of the Islamic
republic and the installation of Maryam Rajavi as
the leader of Iran. At last year’s Paris rally,
the Conservative MP David Amess announced that
“regime change … is at long last within our
grasp”. At the same event, Bolton – who
championed war with Iran long before he joined
the Trump administration – announced that he
expected the MEK to be in power in Tehran before
2019. “The behaviour and the objectives of the
regime are not going to change and, therefore,
the only solution is to change the regime itself,” he declared.
The main attraction at this year’s Paris
conference was another longtime MEK supporter,
former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, now Donald
Trump’s lawyer. “The mullahs must go. The
ayatollah must go,” he told the crowd. “And they
must be replaced by a democratic government which
Madam Rajavi represents.” Giuliani also praised
the work of MEK “resistance units” inside Iran,
that he credited with stoking a recent wave of
protests over the struggling economy. “These
protests are not happening by accident,” he said.
“They’re being coordinated by many of our people
in Albania.” (Giuliani, Bolton and the late John
McCain are among the US politicians who have
travelled to Albania to show support for the MEK.)
Meanwhile, back in Albania, the MEK is struggling
to hold on to its own members, who have begun to
defect. The group is also facing increased
scrutiny from local media and opposition parties,
who question the terms of the deal that brought the MEK fighters to Tirana.
It would be hard to find a serious observer who
believes the MEK has the capacity or support
within Iran to overthrow the Islamic republic.
But the US and UK politicians loudly supporting a
tiny revolutionary group stranded in Albania are
playing a simpler game: backing the MEK is the
easiest way to irritate Tehran. And the MEK, in
turn, is only one small part of a wider Trump
administration strategy for the Middle East,
which aims to isolate and economically strangle Iran.
Before the MEK could become a darling of the
American and European right, it had to reinvent
itself. Democracy, human rights and secularism
would become the group’s new mantra – as its
leader, Maryam Rajavi, renounced violence and
successfully repositioned an anti-western sect as
a pro-American democratic government-in-waiting.
The long march to respectability began with the
US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The war toppled
Saddam Hussein, the MEK’s patron and protector,
but it brought the group into direct contact with
US officials – who would soon be looking for
additional ammunition against Iran.
The US had designated the MEK as a terrorist
group in the late 1990s, as a goodwill gesture
toward a new reformist government in Tehran. When
George W Bush accused Saddam Hussein of
“harbouring terrorists” in a 2002 speech that
made the case for invading Iraq, he was actually
referring to the MEK. But in the early days of
the US occupation of Iraq, a row erupted inside
the White House over what to do with the 5,000
MEK fighters inside their base at Camp Ashraf.
Members of the MEK near Camp Ashraf in the 90s.
Members of the MEK near Camp Ashraf in the 90s. Photograph: Alamy
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state,
argued that the MEK was on the list of terrorist
organisations and should be treated as such. But
Iran hawks, including then secretary of defence,
Donald Rumsfeld, and vice-president Dick Cheney,
argued that the MEK should be used as a weapon
against the Islamic republic – the next target in
the neoconservative roadmap for remaking the
Middle East. (“Boys go to Baghdad, but real men
go to Tehran,” was their half-joking refrain.)
Rumsfeld’s faction won out. Although the group
was still listed as a terrorist organisation, the
Pentagon unilaterally designated MEK fighters
inside Camp Ashraf as “protected persons” under
the Geneva conventions – officially disarmed, but
with their security effectively guaranteed by US
forces in Iraq. The US was protecting a group it also designated as terrorists.
There is no doubt that US hawks regarded the MEK
as a weapon in the fight against Iran: as early
as May 2003, the same month that Bush famously
declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq, the New
York Times reported that “Pentagon hardliners”
were moving to protect the MEK, “and perhaps
reconstitute it later as a future opposition
organisation in Iran, somewhat along the lines of
the US-supported Iraqi opposition under Ahmed
Chalabi that preceded the war in Iraq”. In 2003,
the Bush administration refused an offer, signed
off by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to
hand over MEK leaders in Iraq in exchange for
members of the military council of al-Qaida and
relatives of Osama bin Laden, who had been
captured by Iran as they fled Afghanistan after September 11.
As the US occupation of Iraq collapsed into a
nightmarish civil war, the American right
increasingly blamed Iran for the country’s
disintegration. Senior politicians openly called
for bombing the Islamic republic, amid growing
panic over Iran’s nuclear programme – the
existence of which had first been exposed by the
MEK in what the BBC called a “propaganda coup”
for the group. (Several experts on Israeli
intelligence have reported that Mossad passed
these documents to the MEK.) By 2007, US news
outlets were reporting that Bush had signed a
classified directive authorising “covert action” inside Iran.
Between 2007 and 2012, seven Iranian nuclear
scientists were attacked with poison or magnetic
bombs affixed to moving cars by passing
motorcyclists; five were killed. In 2012, NBC
news, citing two unnamed US officials, reported
that the attacks were planned by Israel’s foreign
intelligence agency and executed by MEK agents
inside Iran. An MEK spokesperson called this a
“false claim … whose main source is the mullahs’ regime”.
It was around this time that the MEK began
working to remake its image in the west. Groups
associated with the MEK donated to political
campaigns, blanketed Washington with
advertisements and paid western political
influencers fees to pen op-eds and give speeches
– and to lobby for its removal from the list of
designated terrorist organisations.
A stupendously long list of American politicians
from both parties were paid hefty fees to speak
at events in favour of the MEK, including
Giuliani, John McCain, Newt Gingrich and former
Democratic party chairs Edward Rendell and Howard
Dean – along with multiple former heads of the
FBI and CIA. John Bolton, who has made multiple
appearances at events supporting the MEK, is
estimated to have received upwards of $180,000.
According to financial disclosure forms, Bolton
was paid $40,000 for a single appearance at the
Free Iran rally in Paris in 2017.
A handful of UK politicians have attended two or
more of the MEK’s Paris events in the past three
years, including the Conservatives Bob Blackman
and Matthew Offord, and the Labour MPs Roger
Godsiff and Toby Perkins. The Conservative MP and
former minister Theresa Villiers has attended the
past two annual Paris events. So has David Amess,
the Conservative MP for Southend West – the MEK’s
loudest champion in the UK parliament, who has
also travelled to the US to speak at a rally in
support of the group. (All of the MPs declined to
reply to questions about their attendance.)
The other British attendees at this year’s Paris
rally included three peers and five former MPs,
including Mike Hancock, who resigned from the
Liberal Democrats after admitting inappropriate
behaviour with a constituent, and Michelle
Thomson, who was forced to resign the SNP whip in
2015 in a controversy over property deals. The
former Bishop of Oxford, John Pritchard, was also
there, carrying a petition in support of the MEK
signed by 75 bishops, including the former
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
At this year’s event, flanked by union jacks and
“#RegimeChange” signs, Villiers spoke of the
importance of women’s rights, “paid tribute” to
Maryam Rajavi – who is barred from entering the
UK – and pledged support for her “just cause” in
seeking to create “an Iran which is free from the
brutal repression of the mullahs”. In a carefully
stage-managed performance, Rajavi laid flowers
and wrote a tribute in an enormous yearbook of
MEK martyrs. “The time has come for the regime’s
overthrow,” she said. “Victory is certain, and Iran will be free.”
One day after the conference, the MEK accused
Tehran of plotting a bomb attack against the
event, following the arrest of four suspects –
including an unnamed Iranian diplomat – in
Belgium, Germany and France. Iran’s foreign
minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, rejected claims
of Iran’s involvement and described the
accusations as a “sinister false flag ploy”.
Even as the MEK successfully amassed political
allies in the west, its security in Iraq eroded
as US troops departed. Between 2009 and 2013,
Iraqi security forces raided the MEK base at
least twice, killing about 100 people. Nouri
al-Maliki, then the prime minister of Iraq –
whose ambassador to the US called the group
“nothing more than a cult” – insisted it leave the country.
Daniel Benjamin, who was then the head of
counter-terrorism at the state department, told
me that the US decided to remove the MEK from the
list of foreign terrorist organisations not
because it believed it had abandoned violence,
but to “avoid them all getting killed” if it
remained in Iraq. After the MEK was no longer
designated a terrorist group, the US was able to
convince Albania to accept the 2,700 remaining
members – who were brought to Tirana on a series
of charter flights between 2014 and 2016.
The group bought up land in Albania and built a
new base. But the move from Iraq to the relative
safety of Albania has precipitated a wave of
defections. Those with means have fled the
country to the EU and the US, but around 120
recent MEK escapees remain in Tirana with no
right to work or emigrate. I spoke to about a
dozen defectors, half of whom are still in
Albania, who said that MEK commanders
systematically abused members to silence dissent
and prevent defections – using torture, solitary
confinement, the confiscation of assets and the
segregation of families to maintain control over
members. In response to these allegations, an MEK
spokesperson said: “The individuals who are
described as ‘former members’ were being used as
part of a demonisation campaign against the MEK.”
The testimony of these recent defectors follows
earlier reports from groups such as Human Rights
Watch, which reported former members witnessed
“beatings, verbal and psychological abuse,
coerced confessions, threats of execution and
torture that in two cases led to death”.
The MEK grew out of Iran’s Liberation Movement,
an Islamic-democratic “loyal opposition”
established in 1961 by the supporters of Mohammad
Mossadegh, the prime minister ousted in a 1953
coup orchestrated by Britain and the US. The
movement called for national sovereignty, freedom
of political activity and the separation of
mosque and state. The MEK cleaved to these
traditions, but responded to the growing
repression of the Shah throughout the 1960s and 70s by rejecting nonviolence.
At the time, the MEK, whose members were largely
idealistic middle-class students, combined
Islamism with Marxist doctrine. They
reinterpreted the Qur’anic passages that
undergirded their Shia faith as injunctions to
socialise the means of production, eliminate the
class system and promote the struggles of Iran’s
ethnic minorities. Steeped in thinkers such as
Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray, they expressed
solidarity with national liberation movements in
Algeria, Cuba, Palestine and Vietnam. Quoting
Lenin’s famous pamphlet, the MEK posed the
question: “What Is to Be Done?” “Our answer is
straightforward,” the MEK wrote: “Armed struggle.”
Rajavi was among 69 members of the MEK tried in
1972 by a military tribunal for plotting acts of
terrorism. “The ruling class is on its deathbed,”
he told the tribunal. When the prosecutor
interrupted him to ask why he had acquired
weapons, Rajavi replied: “To deal with the likes of you.”
Newt Gingrich delivers a speech during the Free
Iran rally in Paris in July 2016.
Newt Gingrich delivers a speech during the Free
Iran rally in Paris in July 2016. Photograph: NurPhoto via Getty
Of the 11 members of the MEK central committee
tried in 1972, nine were immediately executed and
one remained in jail. When Rajavi emerged from
prison in 1979, three weeks before the Iranian
revolution, he was the undisputed leader of
Iran’s most deadly underground rebel group.
The MEK played an important role in the 1979
revolution, seizing the imperial palace and doing
much of the fighting to neutralise the police and
the army. Two days after the revolution, Massoud
Rajavi, who was 30, met the 77-year-old supreme
leader. The two did not hit it off. “I met
Khomeini,” Rajavi told a journalist in 1981. “He
held out his hand for me to kiss, and I refused.
Since then, we’ve been enemies.”
Khomeini saw the MEK as a threat to his power,
barring Rajavi from running for president and
casting his organisation as an enemy of Islam.
Armed members of the newly created Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) disrupted MEK
events, burned its literature and beat up its
members. Without political power, the MEK relied
on street protests. Hundreds of thousands of
Iranians attended its rallies, which the courts soon banned.
In response, the MEK and the president,
Abolhassan Banisadr, who was also antagonistic to
Khomeini, organised two days of protests across
30 cities – forcing Khomeini to go on television
to reiterate the ban. The MEK, he said, were
“waging war on God”. Other clerics warned that
demonstrators would be shot on sight. On 20 June
1981, the MEK organised a mass protest of half a
million people in Tehran, with the aim of
triggering a second revolution. The clerics were
true to their word: 50 demonstrators were killed,
with 200 wounded. Banisadr was removed from
office and a wave of executions followed.
Over the following months and years, the violence
escalated. Khomeini rounded up thousands of MEK
supporters – while his loyalists launched waves
of mob violence against MEK members and sympathisers.
By December, the regime had executed 2,500
members of the MEK. The group counter-attacked
with a spate of assassinations and suicide
bombings against Friday-prayer leaders,
revolutionary court judges and members of the
IRGC. “I am willing to die to help hasten the
coming of the classless society; to keep alive
our revolutionary tradition; and to avenge our
colleagues murdered by this bloodthirsty,
reactionary regime,” wrote one MEK fighter,
Ebrahimzadeh, who killed 13 IRGC and Ayatollah
Sadduqi, a close advisor to Khomeini, by
detonating a hand grenade in a suicide attack in July 1982.
By the mid-1980s, thousands of people labelled as
MEK had been executed or killed in street battles
by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This was the time when Rajavi accepted Saddam’s
offer to fight Iran from the safety of Iraq. Over
the next few years, Rajavi launched an
“ideological revolution”, banning marriage and
enforcing mandatory “eternal” divorce on all
members, who were required to separate from their
husbands or wives. He married one of the new
divorcees, Maryam Azodanlu, who became, in
effect, his chief lieutenant and took his name.
For Saddam, the MEK was a useful, but disposable,
tool in his war against Iran. The MEK, however,
was totally dependent on the Iraqi leader. In
addition to cash and arms, he sent Iranian
prisoners of war to Rajavi as new recruits. “The
whole world was Camp Ashraf,” said Edward
Tramado, one of these prisoners, remembering his
indoctrination. “Nothing else had any meaning for
me,” recalled Tramado, who now lives in Germany.
“I was living in a delusional world. Even though
I knew I had a mother who was waiting for me, my
entire world had become what they had constructed for me.”
In July 1988, six days after the ceasefire that
officially ended the Iran-Iraq war, the MEK
launched a suicidal mission deep into Iranian
territory, dubbed Operation Eternal Light. Once
again, Rajavi predicted his actions would spark
another revolution. “It will be like an
avalanche,” Rajavi told the fighters he was about
to send to their deaths. “You don’t need to take
anything with you. We will be like fish swimming
in a sea of people. They will give you whatever you need.”
The mission would end in a massacre: hapless MEK
fighters were lured into an ambush by the Iranian
army, which crushed them with minimal effort. One
Iranian soldier who took part in the operation
recently described it to me. Mehrad, who
volunteered in 1987 at the age of 15, recalled
that his division, which had fought against Iraqi
soldiers on the southern front, was redeployed to
the north in July 1988 to repel a new assault
from Iraq. His division was sent to a location
near the city of Kermanshah, about 111 miles
(180km) from the border with Iraq. Mehrad and his
fellow soldiers were surprised to hear that enemy
soldiers had managed to make such a deep
incursion into Iran. “We thought our army had given up,” he said.
When he arrived, Mehrad discovered that the enemy
was the MEK – which had been led into a trap.
“Their military strategy was very stupid,” he
told me. “They just drove down the Tehran
highway. It was like if the French army wanted to
invade England and they just drove down the motorway from Dover to London.”
“We very quickly killed thousands of them,”
Mehrad said. “There were piles of bodies on
either side of the road. What was interesting to
us was that many of them were women.” Some MEK
took cyanide rather than be captured alive. The
MEK subsequently claimed that 1,304 of its
members were martyred, and another 1,100 returned to Iraq injured.
The survivors were tried on the spot and quickly
executed; Mehrad watched as hundreds were hanged
at gallows erected in the nearby town of
Eslamabad. Khomeini then used the failed invasion
as a pretext for the mass execution of thousands
of MEK and other leftists in Iranian jails.
Amnesty estimates that more than 4,500 people
were put to death, and some sources say the numbers were even higher.
Eternal Light marked a major turning point for
the MEK. Inside the barbed wire of Camp Ashraf,
as the reality of indefinite exile sank in, a
traumatised and grief-stricken membership turned
against itself under the paranoid leadership of
Rajavi. Several former members told me that after
the bloody defeat, Massoud Rajavi cast himself as
the representative of al-Mahdi, the 12th Imam who
was “hidden” in the 9th century and who,
according to Iranian Shia, will return alongside
Jesus to bring peace and justice to the world.
Outside Camp Ashraf, the MEK continued to stage
cross-border attacks against Iran, and helped
Saddam to crush uprisings against his rule after
his defeat by the US in the 1990 Gulf war. In
March 1991, Saddam deployed the MEK to help quell
the armed Kurdish independence movement in the
north. According to the New York Times, Maryam
Rajavi told her fighters: “Take the Kurds under
your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian
revolutionary guards.” The MEK vehemently denies
it participated in Saddam’s campaigns to put down
the Shia and Kurdish rebellions, but an Iraqi
human rights tribunal has indicted MEK leaders
for their role in suppressing the uprisings.
Karwan Jamal Tahir, the Kurdistan regional
government’s high representative in London, was a
fighter for the Kurdish peshmerga in 1991. He
told me that he remembers how the MEK arrived in
the town of Kalar, about 93 miles (150km)
south-east of Kirkuk, just after Saddam had lost
control of the north of Iraq after the first Gulf
war. “They came in Saddam’s tanks,” he said. “We
thought they were returning peshmerga because the
tanks were covered with portraits of Kurdish
leaders … but they opened fire on the town … It was a big atrocity.”
Maryam Rajavi and Rudy Giuliani at a ceremony
in Tirana in March marking the Iranian new year.
Maryam Rajavi and Rudy Giuliani at a ceremony
in Tirana in March marking the Iranian new year. Photograph: Alamy
In the next decade, the MEK continued to fight
against Iran. In 1992, the group launched
concurrent attacks on Iranian diplomatic missions
in 10 countries, including Iran’s permanent
mission to the UN in New York, which was invaded
by five men with knives. The MEK also settled
more personal scores. In 1998, an assassin killed
Asadollah Lajevardi, the former warden of Evin
prison who had personally overseen the executions of thousands of MEK members.
Back at Camp Ashraf, commanders would tell
wavering members that if they escaped, they would
face certain death at the hands of either Saddam
or the Iranian authorities. “We were far away
from the world,” one member, who only escaped the
MEK after the move to Albania, told me. “We had
no information. No television, no radio.”
Instead, within the camp, they had “Mojahedin
television”, which consisted of looped speeches
by Maryam and Massoud Rajavi, played “all day long”.
Rajavi told his followers that the failure of
Eternal Light was not a military blunder, but was
instead rooted in the members’ thoughts for their
spouses; their love had sapped their will to
fight. In 1990, all couples inside the camp were
ordered to divorce – and women had their wedding
rings replaced by pendants engraved with
Massoud’s face. Spouses were separated, and their
children were sent to be “adopted” by MEK supporters in Europe.
MEK commanders demanded that all members publicly
reveal any errant sexual thoughts. Manouchelur
Abdi, a 55-year-old who also left the MEK in
Albania, told me that the confession sessions
used to take place every morning. Even feelings
of love and friendship were outlawed, he says. “I
would have to confess that I missed my daughter,”
he says. “They would shout at me. They would
humiliate me. They would say that my family was
the enemy and missing them was strengthening the
hand of the mullahs in Tehran.”
Another recent defector, Ali (not his real name)
showed me scars on his arms and legs from what he
described as weeks of torture after he first
joined the group in the early 1990s, including
cigarette burns on his arms. When it was over, he
said, he was taken to Baghdad to meet the leader.
“They took us into a big hall. Massoud Rajavi was
sitting there with a group of women,” Ali
recalled. “[Rajavi said] ‘If any of you say one
word to any one … One word, if any of this is
exposed, reaches anyone else’s ears, or if you
talk about leaving, you’ll be delivered to
[Saddam’s] intelligence service immediately.’”
Batoul Soltani joined the MEK in 1986 with her
husband and infant daughter. At first, her family
was able to live together, but in 1990, she says
she was forced to divorce and give up her
five-year-old daughter and newborn son, who were
sent abroad to be raised by MEK sympathisers.
Soltani alleges that she was forced to have sex
with Massoud Rajavi on multiple occasions,
beginning in 1999. She says that the last assault
was in 2006, the year that she escaped from Camp
Ashraf and a time when Rajavi had not been seen
in public for three years. When we spoke
recently, Soltani accused Maryam Rajavi of
helping Massoud to abuse female MEK members over
the years. “[Massoud] Rajavi thought that the
only achilles heel [for female fighters] was the
opposite sex,” Soltani told me. “He would say
that the only reason you women would leave me is
a man. So, I want all of your hearts.”
Soltani, who was one of three women to speak
about sexual abuse inside the MEK in a 2014
documentary aired on Iranian television, alleged
that Rajavi had hundreds of “wives” inside the camp.
Another former female member, Zahra Moini, who
served as a bodyguard for Maryam Rajavi, told me
that women were threatened with punishment if
they did not divorce their husbands and “marry”
Massoud. “Maryam was involved in this sexual
abuse, she used to read the vows to allow for the
marriage to be consummated,” Moini said, in a telephone interview from Germany.
“Those who didn’t accept to marry would be
disappeared. I was told that if I didn’t divorce
[my husband], I would end up in Ramadi prison and
I would have to sleep with the Iraqi generals
every night.” (In response to questions about
these allegations, an MEK spokesperson said: “The
mullahs’ propaganda machine has been churning out
sexual libels against the resistance and its leader for the past 40 years.”)
Two other female defectors, Zahra Bagheri and
Fereshteh Hedayati, have alleged that they were
given hysterectomies without their consent in the
Camp Ashraf hospital, under the pretext they were
being operated on for minor ailments. In the
eccentric ideological language of the group, the
women say the procedure was retrospectively
justified to victims as representing “the peak” of loyalty to their leader.
Hedayati, who survived the massacres of Operation
Eternal Light, joined the MEK as a 22-year-old in
1981 with her husband, who is still inside the
group. “They said I had a cyst,” she told me.
“But they also took out my womb. They told me
that it meant that I had an even stronger
connection to our ideological leader.” Hedayati,
who left the group in Iraq and now lives in
Norway, says she was never sexually abused, but
was “brainwashed” by the group into divorcing her
husband, and alleges that more than 100 other
women were sterilised by MEK doctors. “I always
ask myself why they did this to us,” Bagheri
said. “Of course, to take away our futures.”
Between an escape attempt in 2001 and her exit
from the MEK in 2013, Hedayati says she was
subject to extraordinarily harsh treatment by her
commanders. “They said I was a lesbian,” she
says. “They spat on me, they beat me, they locked
me up. I was put in jail, in solitary confinement.”
Albania ostensibly accepted the MEK members for
humanitarian reasons – but the country’s leaders
may have seen an opportunity to curry favour with
the US government, which had seen its offers
rejected by various other European states. “They
were the only ones who would take them,” the
former state department official Daniel Benjamin has said.
Olsi Jazexhi, a professor of history at the
University of Durres critical of the government’s
decision to accept the MEK fighters, says that
Albanian politicians hoped the deal would lead
the US to turn a blind eye to their own
corruption. “The MEK is a card which gives them
leverage with the United States,” he said. “They
think that by taking the MEK, the Americans will
leave their business alone.” (A secret US state
department cable from 2009, published by
WikiLeaks, said that the country’s three major
parties “all have MPs with links to organised
crime … Conventional wisdom, backed by other
reporting, is that the new parliament has quite a
few drug traffickers and money launderers.”)
For the Trump administration, the MEK is a
valuable asset in the escalating regional
conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This
summer, Trump abruptly pulled out of the Iran
nuclear agreement and announced new sanctions,
triggering a currency collapse and four months of
sporadic protests across Iran. The US has
reimposed tough sanctions this week, targeting
Iranian oil exports and banking. But Trump’s
Middle East strategy has come under new scrutiny
after the murder of the journalist Jamal
Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul – which has
sparked a backlash against the crown prince,
Mohammed bin Salman, and his allies in the Trump administration.
For most of its life in exile, the MEK was funded
by Saddam. After his downfall, the group says it
raised money from Iranian diaspora organisations
and individual donors. The MEK has always denied
it is financed by Saudi Arabia – but the former
Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal,
made waves when he attended the group’s 2016
rally in Paris and called for the fall of the Iranian regime.
“The money definitely comes from Saudis,” says
Ervand Abrahamian, a professor at the City
University of New York and author of the
definitive academic work on the group’s history,
The Iranian Mojahedin. “There is no one else who
could be subsidising them with this level of finance.”
Analysts agree that the MEK lacks the capacity or
support to overthrow the Iranian government – as
even Bolton and Pompeo would surely concede.
“They are probably smart enough to know that this
group is not democratic and anyway has no
constituency inside Iran,” said Paul Pillar, who
served in the CIA for 28 years, including a
period as the agency’s senior counter-terrorism
analyst. Trump and his Iran hawks, Pillar said,
are not concerned with replacing the current
regime so much as causing it to crumble. “They
are pursuing anything that would disrupt the
political order in Iran so they and the president
can cite such an outcome as a supposed victory no
matter what comes afterwards.”
According to one recent MEK defector, Hassan
Heyrani, the group’s main work in Albania
involves fighting online in an escalating
information war between Iran and its rivals.
Heyrani, who left the MEK last summer, says that
he worked in a “troll farm” of 1,000 people
inside the Albanian camp, posting pro-Rajavi and
anti-Iran propaganda in English, Farsi and Arabic
on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and newspaper comment sections.
“We worked from morning to night with fake
accounts,” he says. “We had orders daily that the
commanders would read for us. ‘It is your duty to
promote this senator, this politician, or
journalist writing against Iran’ and we would say
‘Thank you, the Iranian people support you and
Maryam Rajavi is the rightful leader’, but if
there was a negative story on the MEK, we would
post ‘You are the mercenaries of the Iranian
regime, you are not the voice of the Iranian
people, you don’t want freedom for Iran’.” An MEK
spokesperson called these allegations “another
lie” made up to support the Iranian foreign ministry.
According to Marc Owen Jones, an academic who
studies political bots on social media,
“thousands” of suspicious Twitter accounts
emerged in early 2016 with “Iran” as their
location and “human rights” in their description
or account name, which posted in support of Trump
and the MEK. These accounts, says Jones, were
created in batches and would promote Trump’s
anti-Iran rhetoric using the hashtags
#IranRegimeChange, #FreeIran and #IstandwithMaryamRajavi.
Albanian journalists say that the MEK, which has
close contacts with senior politicians and the
security services, operates with impunity within
Albania. Ylli Zyla, who served as head of
Albanian military intelligence from 2008 to 2012,
accused the MEK of violating Albanian law.
“Members of this organisation live in Albania as
hostages,” he told me. Its camp, he said, was
beyond the jurisdiction of Albanian police and
“extraordinary psychological violence and threats of murder” took place inside.
Former members accuse the MEK of responsibility
for the death in June of Malek Shara’i, a senior
commander who was found drowned by police divers
at bottom of a reservoir behind the group’s
Albanian base. Shara’i’s sister, Zahra Shara’i,
said that his family had received news from
former members that Malek was about to escape,
and says the MEK was responsible for his death.
“I am their enemy and I will not rest until I get
my revenge,” she told the Guardian from Iran. The
MEK said that Shara’i drowned while attempting to
save another member from drowning. The Albanian
police said the death was not suspicious.
While defectors with private means have been
smuggled out of the country into the EU, many
former members live hand-to-mouth in Tirana. The
Albanian state has not granted refugee rights to
the MEK or its defectors, and a UN monthly
stipend of 30,000 lek (£215) lapsed on 1
September. “They’re stuck,” says Jazexhi, who has
worked to support the defectors. “They don’t know
the languages, they don’t know the laws, they
don’t know what democracy is. They are used to
dictators. We tell them that they shouldn’t be afraid.”
Migena Balla, the lawyer representing Mostafa and
Robabe Mohammadi, the couple in Tirana fighting
for the release of their daughter Somayeh,
believes that pressure has been put to bear on
both the police and the judiciary to ensure the
MEK does not “create political problems”.
“Politics is interfering in the judicial system,”
she says. “When I went to the police station to
register their complaint the police officers
actually ran away. They are scared of losing their jobs.”
The MEK has not taken kindly to the presence of
the Mohammadis in Albania. They accuse Mostafa –
and any former member who has spoken out against
the MEK – of being a paid agent of the “mullah
regime”. On 27 July, Mostafa was hospitalised
following an assault by four senior members of
the MEK, which was captured on video by his wife.
The attackers, who shouted “Terrorist!” at
Mohammadi, were briefly detained by Albanian
police. But, after a phalanx of MEK members
arrived at the police station, the men were promptly released.
The MEK has published letters, purportedly
written by Somayeh, accusing her father of being
an Iranian intelligence agent. A nervous-looking
Somayeh recently gave a video interview inside
the MEK base saying that she wishes to remain a member of the group.
The Mohammadis have responded with open letters
to their daughter and to Albanian politicians,
calling for an unsupervised meeting with their
daughter. “I am your mother Mahboubeh Robabe
Hamza and I want to meet with you,” Robabe wrote
to Somayeh. “I am the woman who fed you at my
breast, I held you in the crook of my arm. You
are my flesh and blood … I love you more than my
life … I’m getting old, I am getting tired, but
life is not worth living without seeing you.”
Arron Merat was a Tehran correspondent for the
Economist between 2011 and 2014. He has covered
Iran for the Guardian, the Sunday Times and Vice News. He tweets at @a_merat
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'From South America, where payment must be made
with subtlety, the Bormann organization has made
a substantial contribution. It has drawn many of
the brightest Jewish businessmen into a
participatory role in the development of many of
its corporations, and many of these Jews share
their prosperity most generously with Israel. If
their proposals are sound, they are even provided
with a specially dispensed venture capital fund.
I spoke with one Jewish businessmen in Hartford,
Connecticut. He had arrived there quite unknown
several years before our conversation, but with
Bormann money as his leverage. Today he is more
than a millionaire, a quiet leader in the
community with a certain share of his profits
earmarked as always for his venture capital
benefactors. This has taken place in many other
instances across America and demonstrates how
Bormann’s people operate in the contemporary
commercial world, in contrast to the fanciful
nonsense with which Nazis are described in so much “literature.”
So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish
participation in Bormann companies that when
Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv
to stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the
Jewish and German communities of Buenos Aires.
Jewish leaders informed the Israeli authorities
in no uncertain terms that this must never happen
again because a repetition would permanently
rupture relations with the Germans of Latin
America, as well as with the Bormann
organization, and cut off the flow of Jewish
money to Israel. It never happened again, and the
pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of
these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an
Argentinian safe haven, protected by the most
efficient German infrastructure in history as
well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.'
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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