Founded in 1965 by a group of leftist Iranian college students as an Islamic political movement, the “Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization” was mainly devoted to opposing the rule of the Shah before the Islamic revolution.
In its first five years, the group primarily engaged in ideological work, their interpretation of Islam, and economic and political ideas. The MKO preached a combination of Marxism and Islamism.
They argued that not only did God create the world, but he also set forth a historical evolution in which a classless society would supplant capitalist inequity. Such a radical misinterpretation of Islam bred division, not only with the secular and capitalist state but also with the traditional, conservative clergy which resented the MKO argument that “Shiite Ulama” [religious scholars], just like the Sunnis, have failed to grasp the real essence of Qur‘anic dynamism."Rajavi and other MKO ideologues misinterpreted religion to justify terrorism.
The organization is known by a variety of names including Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK), The National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA) which is the group's armed wing, Peoples’ Mujahedin Of Iran (PMOI) which is the founding member of a coalition of organizations called National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), while others including the U.S. FBI claims that the NCRI is either an "alias" for or a front group for the PMOI. Both organizations share the same leader and offices. The PMOI itself described the NCRI as its "Political Branch" in documents found by the FBI in December 2001. The terror cell is also referred to as Rajavis’ cult and Iranian Pol Pots.
Conversion to Marxism
SAVAK (the intelligence service of Shah’s regime) had eliminated the whole of MKO’s original leadership through executions or street battles in the early 70s. In October 1975 the organization underwent an ideological split. While the remaining primary members of MKO were imprisoned, some of the original low-level members of MKO formed a new organization that followed Marxist, not Islamic, ideals. Later, the central leadership of the organization declared in a book entitled “Manifesto on Ideological Issues” that after ten years of secret existence, four years of armed struggle, and two years of intense ideological rethinking, they had reached the conclusion that Marxism, not Islam, was the true revolutionary philosophy.
After the organization converted to Marxism, it lost much of its popularity among the Muslim people of Iran. Three weeks before the Islamic revolution, Massoud Rajavi who was not executed because of his wide collaboration with the SAVAK was released from the prison and assumed leadership of the MKO upon his release.
Armed conflict with the Islamic government
Ambitiously trying to confiscate the revolution, the MKO revealed its cultish nature and adapted terrorist approaches, and finally started an armed conflict with the Islamic government after the Islamic revolution in Iran. On 28 June 1981, bombs were detonated at the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party. Around 70 high-ranking officials, including Chief Justice Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, cabinet members, and elected members of parliament, were killed. The bomber was identified as a Mujahedin operative by the name of Mohammad Reza Kolahi, who had secured a job in the building disguised as a sound engineer.
Two months later on August 30, another bomb was detonated killing the popularly elected President Rajai and Premier Ayatollah Mohammad Javad Bahonar. An active member of the Mujahedin, Massoud Kashmiri, was identified as the perpetrator. It is estimated that more than 16000 innocent Iranian people were assassinated by the organization in the early years after the revolution. Eventually, in 1981, when Imam Khomeini dismissed President Bani Sadr, Rajavi and Bani Sadr along with the majority of the cult’s leadership and members fled to France.
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Colonel Hooshang Vahid-Dastjerdi was born in 1925, in Isfahan. He was Commander of the Iran Police force. On August 30, 1981, During a bomb explosion in the prime minister’s office, by the terrorists of MKO, Vahid-Dastjerdi was seriously injured and after 6 days he was martyred in hospital due to the severity of the wounds on September 05, 1981. |
Betraying the motherland
Expelled by France in 1986, the cult transferred its headquarters to Iraq during the Iraqi imposed war on Iran. According to the US State Department, the MKO received all of its military support and most of its financial assistance from Saddam's government until the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The cult started helping Saddam in the war which was started by an invasion by the Iraqi army and cost many tens of thousands of Iranians lives. The cult has lost much of its popular support within Iran since siding with Iraq and the MKO are known in Iran as Monafeghin meaning Hippocrates.
According to presentations of the MKO by the U.S. Department of State and the Foreign Affairs group of the Australian Parliament, the MKO assisted the Iraqi Republican Guard in suppressing the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Maryam Rajavi, who assumed the leadership role of the MKO after a series of years as co-leader alongside her husband Massoud Rajavi, has been reported by former members of the MKO as having said: "Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards."
The MKO also has used front organizations to solicit contributions from expatriate Iranian communities. They have managed to conceal their terrorist nature and present themselves as political parties with the intention of exploiting the facilities of governments and international organizations to the advantage of their own cult.
Designation as a terrorist organization
The principles and modus operandi NCRI follows, caused the US State Department to designate the group along with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MKO / MEK) and the National Liberation Army (NLA) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Having been designated as a terrorist group in the US, NCRI has managed to get its name removed from the EU terror list via bribing European authorities and shedding crocodile tears while HRW has revealed a part of the inter cult relations in MKO camp in Iraq.
Their bloody terrorist history reveals that the only reason they aren't proven to have committed terrorist activities in recent years is that they are restricted in a camp by American forces in Iraq and would undoubtedly resume the terrorist activities they are addicted to. The European court which has delisted the MKO relies only on some partial evidence of the past five years for its judgment. MKO cessation of militarism and terrorism claimed by the group and to which the court refers as evidence has never been the result of a deliberate choice but forced on it following the coalition forces' attack to Iraq as part of fulfilling a mission of uprooting terrorism.
There is clear evidence to show that MKO military activities continued right up to the allied invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Even right now they are openly promoting terrorism and threatening their critics in the EU and US. MKO’s resort to militarism is not the outcome of a once deliberate decision to abandon it deliberately but innate in its early ideology and methodology of struggle. As once openly asserted by Mehdi Abrishamchi, Maryam Rajavi’s first husband, the military infrastructure of the organization stems from its ideology; “We are not the ones to decide the necessity of an organized or aggressive struggle; we are not the ones to decide where to an organized or unorganized struggle leads us. It is not our mentality to decide the necessity of an armed struggle”.
MKO; second to al-Qaeda
MKO only believes in a black and white world and whoever walks in the former side is the foe and has to be confronted. If the supposed foe is too powerful to confront, the language of profanity and threat will substitute. MKO’s blasphemous and threatening tone in reaction to the EU Council of Ministers’ decision and other international and humanitarian organizations that disclosed truths on the violent nature of the group portend heavy costs that the European states have to sustain. Long known as a globally blacklisted terrorist group, MKO is transformed into a destructive cult and a cult of personality as proscribed by the US State Department report in May 2007. In many cases, MKO is referred to as second to al-Qaeda for its globally threatening features and, in spite of being expelled from Iraq, the majority of Western countries’ security apparatus are cautious about the penetration of its members since they know they would have a hard task to deal with the organization.
A terrorist group with a cultish nature
The group is now led by Maryam Rajavi, who has already proclaimed herself “president” of Iran and is worshiped by her followers. Although her husband, Massoud Rajavi, is the titular commander-in-chief of the “National Liberation Army,” a large percentage of the officers in their Camp Ashraf compound are women, and females constitute a majority of the fighters.
In 2003, French anti-terrorist police raided Maryam Rajavi's place in Auvers-Sur-Oise, securing millions of Euros and taking Maryam Rajavi and some of her collaborators into custody. Several of Rajavi's followers set themselves on fire to protest her arrest, confirming official French concerns about the cultish nature of the group. A 2004 FBI report concludes:
“The MKO practices daily ‘cult-like activity to include daily confessions in front of their peers…dissolution of marriages, and removal of children from parents… fighters are separated from their children who are sent to Europe and brought up by the MKO Support Network. The investigation has learned that these children are then further indoctrinated into the organization and are often used for various social benefit fraud such as was revealed during joint FBI/Cologne Police Department investigation in Germany.”
Shipped off to the welfare states of Europe, the unfortunate children of these fanatics are used as cogs in the MEK money machine, producing a steady flow of welfare checks flowing into the group’s coffers. Members are indoctrinated from birth to worship Maryam, who claims her edicts come from God, and are kept in conditions that included, in one case in Germany, of a child being chained to her bed. As the FBI reported:
“In one case one of the children was chained to a bed and only after her escape and report to local police was the fraud scheme discovered. Interviews of some of these MKO children found children fully indoctrinated into a ‘cult-like organization with no regard to the welfare of the child. These children are then returned to the NLA to be used as fighters upon coming of age. Interviews also revealed that some of these children were told that their parents would be harmed if the children did not cooperate with the MKO. Open-source reporting from defecting MKO members has revealed that MKO fighters are often told the same story about their children should they take issue with MKO leadership and desire to leave the organization.”
A History of human rights violation
Human Rights Watch reports that MKO commits extensive human rights abuses against its own members at Camp Ashraf, including “torture that in two cases led to death.”
A RAND report commissioned by DOD found that the MKO is a cult that utilizes practices such as mandatory divorce, celibacy, authoritarian control, forced labor, sleep deprivation, physical abuse, confiscation of assets, emotional isolation, and the imprisonment of dissident members. RAND concluded that up to 70% of the MKO members at their Camp Ashraf headquarters were likely recruited through deception and are kept there against their will. A 2004 FBI report concludes:
“The MKO practices daily ‘cult-like activity to include daily confessions in front of their peers…dissolution of marriages, and removal of children from parents… fighters are separated from their children who are sent to Europe and brought up by the MKO Support Network. The investigation has learned that these children are then further indoctrinated into the organization and are often used for various social benefit fraud such as was revealed during joint FBI/Cologne Police Department investigation in Germany.”
Shipped off to the welfare states of Europe, the unfortunate children of these fanatics are used as cogs in the MEK money machine, producing a steady flow of welfare checks flowing into the group’s coffers. Members are indoctrinated from birth to worship Maryam, who claims her edicts come from God, and are kept in conditions that included, in one case in Germany, of a child being chained to her bed. As the FBI reported:
“In one case one of the children was chained to a bed and only after her escape and report to local police was the fraud scheme discovered. Interviews of some of these MKO children found children fully indoctrinated into a ‘cult-like organization with no regard to the welfare of the child. These children are then returned to the NLA to be used as fighters upon coming of age. Interviews also revealed that some of these children were told that their parents would be harmed if the children did not cooperate with the MKO. Open-source reporting from defecting MKO members has revealed that MKO fighters are often told the same story about their children should they take issue with MKO leadership and desire to leave the organization.”
A capacity and will to commit terrorist acts in the U.S. & beyond
The Bush administration determined in 2007 that “MKO leadership and members across the world maintain the capacity and will to commit terrorist acts in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond.
Prison Ashraf
MKO members resided in camp Ashraf North West of Baghdad until September 2013 before they were relocated to Camp Liberty. Camp Ashraf could be compared to prison or even worse. There are reliable documents about how the gang leaders abuse their deceived members and how members are brainwashed or to what extent they are deprived of basic human rights and freedom of expression while suffering from severe mental as well as physical problems. The members have to do only what they are ordered to (what is needed in a cult). They are more like machines rather than human beings while not knowing what thinking means. The members are often deprived of the right to see their relatives. Women in Rajavi's cult are even sexually enslaved and have to divorce their sexuality. One can't possibly imagine what goes on in camp Ashraf and would not believe to what level of persecution and torture the dissident members are subject to.