Free Republic

I once asked a senior American official about why he accepted honoraria from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or the MKO, given the group’s cultlike nature and its lack of popularity inside Iran. His response: Even if the group lied about its support, they said the right things about democracy and regime change, and so he saw no harm in collecting the cash. The regime’s fall, he said, would be a moment of truth: Either the MKO would prove itself right, or its political Ponzi scheme would collapse. The problem with engaging in the MKO’s endorsement-for-cash scheme is the impact it has on...

The Mujahedin al Khalq, or MKO, is, after the Iranian regime itself, the most hated group inside Iran. It allied with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to enable the Islamic Revolution but, after a falling out, launched a terrorist campaign inside Iran. The MKO also cast its lot with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Its leader, Maryam Rajavi, rules with an iron fist over the organization and insists upon the same head covering that Iranians risk their lives to shed. Far from supporting women’s rights, the group tells women whom they can marry and forcibly divorces them. In short, it is a cult

Human rights usually feature prominently in America's political rhetoric but fade insignificance when it comes to concrete action. That trend can take a historic turn when it comes to Iran, where a genocidal madman has taken the presidency. That the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi in Iran hasn't galvanized governments in the West and in the U.S. in particular to pursue his prosecution is still a mystery. Human rights groups, UN experts, Nobel laureates, scores of elected officials, lawmakers, and journalists have already expressed outrage over Raisi's rise to power. And justifiably so. In 1988, Raisi was one of the members...

The MKO’s tendency to cry wolf hinder and obstruct the real fights against the Iranian regime, Iranian terrorism, and the Islamic Republic’s covert nuclear program. The Mujahedin al-Khalq (MKO) formed against the backdrop of the anti-shah opposition in the 1960s and evolved to become an important component of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary coalition. But Khomeini turned on the MKO as he consolidated his dictatorship. Unlike others forced out of power, persecuted domestically, or sent into exile, the MKO fought back: They both sponsored a terror campaign targeting regime officials—killing many innocent bystanders in the process—and they accepted Iraqi dictator Saddam...

-excerpt- "A significant number of residents have reported to U.N. monitors that they are not free to leave the camp, to participate in the resettlement process offered by UNHCR, to contact family members outside Iraq, or to have contact with other relatives even within the camp itself," he said, referring to the U.N. refugee agency

Kyrgyz student Alina Alymkulova recounts how she was recruited to travel from Prague to Paris to attend a rally for the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), an Iranian opposition movement in exile. -excerpt- I was in Prague listening to music online and checking news on social media when an advertisement caught my eye. It offered a weekend trip to Paris, a city I always dreamed of visiting at least once during my lifetime. The price was amazingly cheap -- round-trip by bus and bed and breakfast at a four-star hotel would cost me only 35 euros ($46). I wrote to the...

A FEW weeks ago I received an e-mail from an acquaintance with the subject line: Have you seen the video everyone is talking about? I clicked play, and there was Howard Dean, on March 19 in Berlin, at his most impassioned, extolling the virtues of a woman named Maryam Rajavi and insisting that America should recognize her as the president of Iran. Ms. Rajavi and her husband, Massoud, are the leaders of a militant Iranian opposition group called the Mujahedeen Khalq, or Warriors of God. The group’s forces have been based for the last 25 years in Iraq, where I...

A growing number of former U.S. officials — both Republicans and Democrats — have hopped on the bandwagon to demand that the State Department delist the Mujahedin al-Khalq Organization (MKO) from its list of terrorist groups.I consider the MKO a terrorist group for good reason. There is no doubt that the MKO has targeted Americans, and no amount of slick public relations should erase that. During my time in Iran, it was clear that while Iranians respect the United States and have little good to say about their own government, they all detest the MKO.The enemy of my enemy...

PARIS (AFP) - Iran's exiled opposition movement said Thursday it had learned of two previously unknown sites in and near Tehran that are being used to build nuclear warheads. "Resistance sources have managed to uncover two centres that work directly on nuclear armaments and which were until now kept secret," Mehdi Abrihamtchi of the People's Mujahedeen told reporters in Paris, where his group is based. "They are places for research and production of detonation systems which is a major part of the mullah's atomic bomb project," he said, adding that his organisation had passed on the information to the UN...

In a letter to a British parliamentarian last month, a senior State Department official insisted that the United States was “doing its utmost” to ensure that Iraq’s government would treat 3,400 Iranian exiles living at Camp Ashraf in eastern Iraq “humanely.” Two weeks later, a clash between the exiles and Iraqi police left 11 Iranians dead, and 36 were taken into custody by Iraqi forces. Americans troops had guarded the camp since 2003, but recently handed over responsibility to Iraqi forces. Baghdad promised that the exiles would be protected. There is no authoritative version of events, but it does not...

Iraq's government acknowledged on Thursday that seven Iranian exiles were killed when Iraqi forces took control of their camp this week north of Baghdad. Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh earlier denied anyone died in the clashes between Iraqi forces and protesters who tried to block their entry into Camp Ashraf, home to the People's Mujahideen Organization of Iran Iraq, Iran and the United States call the dissident group a terrorist organization. Iraq's Shi'ite Arab-led government wants to close the camp and send residents back to Iran or to a third country. Dabbagh, on Thursday, said seven people had died but disputed...

TEHRAN/BAGHDAD - On Tuesday, Iraqi soldiers and riot police stormed Camp Ashraf, where Mojahedin Khalq Organization members had been based, triggering violent clashes that left at least 260 people injured. Iraqi officials say clashes broke out as they were trying to establish a police post in the camp. “After the failure of negotiations with the Mojahedin (Khalq) to enter peacefully, the Iraqi army entered Camp Ashraf with force and it now controls the interior and all entrances to the camp,” an Iraqi military source said. An Iraqi army spokesman in Diyala said two battalions of 400 soldiers each plus 200...

Iran's interior minister on Wednesday accused U.S. spy agency the CIA of helping to fund "rioters," stepping up accusations of Western involvement in street unrest following the country's disputed election. "Britain, America and the Zionist regime (Israel) were behind the recent unrest in Tehran," Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars News Agency. "Many of the rioters were in contact with America, CIA and the MKO and are being fed by their financial resources," he said. The MKO (Mujahideen Khalq Organization) is an exiled Iranian opposition group.

BRUSSELS - An Iranian opposition group called on Wednesday for the U.N. nuclear watchdog to immediately inspect facilities in Iran which it said were at the core of an accelerated nuclear weapons programme. The National Council of Resistance of Iran dismissed a December U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that Tehran stopped trying to make a nuclear warhead in 2003, shortly after the group first revealed the country's nuclear enrichment activity. It charged that Iran had established a new command and control centre for the programme coded-named Lavizan-2 at Mojdeh on the southeastern outskirts of Tehran last April, near the site of...

Paris, 1Sept. (IPS) By 1988, there was nothing left of the relatively free atmosphere people acquired for a short period after the Iranian revolution of 1979. The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI)’s brutal machine of repression had already uprooted a great number of other thinkers. Thousands of activists and sympathisers of the opposition groups had been already arrested, tortured, forced to repent or summarily executed, and their political rallies and media were banned. The peak of atrocity was however a death-fatwa in summer of 1988 issued by Grand Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, the founder of the IRI. The fatwa was initially...

Provo, Utah - The head of the Iranian opposition group in exile that supplied early intelligence on Iran's clandestine nuclear program says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has engineered a clever disinformation campaign to convince foreign experts that Iran is eight to 10 years away from developing a nuclear bomb. But in fact, she says, the regime is less than two years away from producing such a weapon, as part of its plan to "create an Iranian empire" in the Middle East. In a wide-ranging weekend telephone conversation from her base of exile in Paris, Maryam Rajavi told me that Mr. Ahmadinejad...

What could the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) possibly have in common? CAIR founders had close ties to Hamas, Palestinian Sunni Islamic extremists. NIAC and its main spokesman, Trita Parsi, have become apologists for the regime in Tehran, which exports a rival Shiite brand of Islamic extremism. Sunnis and Shias. We all know the story. They hate each other worse than Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. Right? Well, no. As I pointed out in Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, Sunnis and Shias get along just fine when it...

A National Post investigation has found the outlawed terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq recruited teenagers in Canada and sent them abroad to overthrow the Iranian government by force. Today, part three of a five-part series about a Canadian family that got deeply involved with the guerrillas -- and now regrets it.- - - At 11 o'clock in the morning on June 19, 2003, Mustafa Mohammady stopped his car on Sussex Drive in Ottawa, opened the driver's door and headed toward the French embassy. He held a gasoline canister in one hand and a lighter in the other. Two days earlier, French...

LE BOURGET, France, July 1 — Thousands of Iranians from across Europe gathered here today in support of the National Council of Resistance of Iran and its leader, Maryam Rajavi, who was recently freed from French judicial restrictions that limited her movement. Ms. Rajavi's message to the assembled crowd of 10,000 or more was that Iran needed neither nuclear weapons nor nuclear power but secular democracy, presumably led by Ms. Rajavi herself — or her husband, Massoud Rajavi, who is now presumed to be in hiding in Iraq. But the meeting's deeper message was that the Rajavi organization is still...

Few terrorists groups garner the bipartisan endorsement and support that Iran's Mujahedin al-Khalq Organization [MKO] has. On October 20, 2005, several congressmen and many aides attended a briefing in Congress. Maryam Rajavi, co-leader of the group and self-styled president-elect of Iran, addressed the gathering by video from France.[1] She received a warm reception. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) thanked "Sister Maryam."[2] A bipartisan group of U.S. Congressmen have signed petitions calling for the U.S. Department of State to lift its 1997 classification of the group as a terrorist organization.[3] In an April 8, 2003 interview, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairwoman...