Six people were killed and more than 50 were wounded on Saturday when several dozen mortar shells fell on a refugee camp for members of an Iranian opposition group, according to an Iraqi police official.
The camp, on the site of a former American military base near the Baghdad airport known as Camp Liberty, is home to about 3,400 Iranian exiles who are members of Mujahedeen Khalq, or M.E.K., a militant organization. It was removed from the State Department’s terrorist list in September after years of intensive lobbying from prominent American politicians and former military officers, who viewed the group as a legitimate democratic alternative to the Iranian government.
In an e-mail sent to news media outlets in Iraq, the military wing of Hezbollah in Iraq, a militant organization believed to have connections to the main Lebanese group and to Iran, claimed responsibility for the attack and warned that others would follow.
Although Hezbollah in Iraq was active during the American military presence there, attacks by the group died down after the Americans left, and its leaders said they would lay down arms and join the political process. But in an ominous sign that a recent spate of deadly sectarian conflicts in Iraq might escalate, the group announced at a recent news conference that it was establishing a militia to fight Sunni groups that had been attacking Shiites. Camp Liberty is meant to be a temporary residence for the Iranian refugees while the United Nations works to find host countries for them. In a statement issued from Geneva, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, called the attack “a despicable act of violence” and said the residents of the camp were asylum seekers entitled to international protection.
In a statement, the M.E.K. accused the Iranian government and Iraqi forces of being behind the attack, and said the Iraqi government had recently removed the blast walls surrounding the camp, leaving the refugees unsafe. The group said that more than 100 had been injured in the shelling and that its demands to return to its previous location in Iraq, Camp Ashraf, had been ignored.
“The residents and their representatives have warned about a massacre by the Iranian regime and the Iraqi forces,” the statement said, “and demanded several times from the secretary general of the United Nations and U.S. officials to return to Camp Ashraf, where concrete buildings and shelters are available.”
Ali al-Moussawi, an Iraqi government spokesman, denied that Baghdad was involved, saying the accusation from the M.E.K. “is not the first time when they blame us for everything.”
The United Nations demanded that the Iraqi government open an investigation, saying in a statement that Martin Kobler, the United Nations special representative for Iraq, “called on the Iraqi authorities to immediately ensure medical care for the wounded.”
The M.E.K. had long resisted leaving Camp Ashraf, on land that had been set aside by Saddam Hussein, the toppled Iraqi dictator, and did so only because the United States made it a condition of dropping the group’s terrorist designation. An American official said in August that the M.E.K. had been using Camp Ashraf for paramilitary training.
The group carried out bombings in Iran in the 1970s against the shah’s government and later against the Islamic government, causing the death of several Americans, but by most accounts it has not engaged in terrorism in recent years. But Iraq’s current government, a close ally of Iran, views the M.E.K. as a terrorist group and wants it out of the country.
By YASIR GHAZI
presence, has claimed responsibility for the mortar attacks on Camp Liberty that left a count casualty of nearly 60 on both sides, the Iraqi guards and the residing MKO members. In a statement, as it was expected, MKO accused the Iranian and Iraqi regimes to be not only the responsible but behind the attacks. But the chief responsible for the attacks and the inflicted casualties is MKO itself with Massoud Rajavi at the head.
“inhumane condition” of Camp Liberty, the group leaders and supporters propagate “the necessity of returning residents to Ashraf”. Alejo Vida Quadras, the top MKO supporter in European Parliament suggested the new propaganda under the pretext of "lack of progress in relocation to third countries".
In recent years Rajavi’s major strategy, as the totalitarian leader of the MKO cult, has been to have the MKO name removed from the American FTO list, and the members and supporters were constantly promised that ‘once this “obstacle” is removed, the Iranian regime will immediately be toppled’. The cult leader Massoud Rajavi, who prefers to remain in hiding in order not to be required to answer any questions, must now be confronted with this logical query: ‘now that the obstacle has been removed, when will the Islamic Republic collapse?’
Just about three weeks after the justly made decision, some defected members of the terrorist Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO, MEK, PMOI, NCR) voiced their preparedness to give a testimony before the Swedish parliament about MKO’s key role in the massacre of Iraqi Kurds during the rule of the ousted Saddam. Reportedly, through last few weeks the Swedish Parliament is working to also officially recognize this joint Saddam-MKO military plot, called Operation Morvarid (Pearl), as another crime against the Iraqi Kurds.
under the tag of ideology, MKO inaugurated the ideological revolution to introduce a charismatic authoritarian leader to exert control over every aspect of his adherents’ life and to establishing a totalitarian pyramidal structure where the chosen devoted commanders would act as the leader’s deputies in his absence. But the leader needed certain facilities to implement the newly devised mind control. The most important prerequisite was of course a remote place isolated from the outside world to disconnect the contact of their followers from the outside world, particularly from their families and friends and even from their past. To phrase it in technical terms, MKO was desperately in need of a cultic milieu, the most central in creating the thought reform environment as depicted by Robert Jay Lifton:
containing a nuclear bunker, arms caches, a satellite communications system, its own water and power supplies, dormitories, refectories, meeting rooms and leisure facilities, has been replaced for the residents by a 1km square area with prefab huts for living quarters. And their marching orders to leave Iraq ASAP. 