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Albania

The devil must live in Tirana

Terrorists or democrats? Albania is home to 2500 Iranian People’s Mujahedin. Their goal is to overthrow the Iranian regime. They also maintain good contacts in the German Bundestag.
In Tehran, the ayatollahs lead the Iranian people with a hard hand[..]. They have been in power for more than 40 years. Since then, exiled Iranians have been planning to overthrow the government in Tehran. There are several Iranian groups abroad. The largest are the so-called People’s Mujahideen, of which 2500 members are said to live in a camp in Albania. According to their own statements, they want to form a democratic state out of the Islamic Republic. They receive support for such a”regime change”from top American politicians, but also from German members of the Bundestag, such as CDU politician Martin Patzelt.

In Brussels and Berlin, the People’s Mujahideen – also called mujahideen-e khalq and MEK – do intensive lobbying. Members of the resistance group are standing in front of the government buildings and approaching MPs. In this way, Patzelt became aware of the organization – and is now a member of the board of the”German Solidarity Committee for a Free Iran”, which represents the interests of the People’s Mujahideen in Germany.

Frankfurter

The MEK is mentioned in the substantive work in the Bundestag. As a member of the Human Rights Committee, Patzelt thematized the People’s Mujahideen. Other well-known German politicians also support the association based in Berlin-Wilmersdorf as chairperson and advisory board: the former Bundestag president Rita Süssmuth and Otto Bernhardt, board member of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. They write guest articles for German newspapers in which they draw attention to the situation of exiled Iranians in Albania, hold conferences and visit Iranians in Albania. In an interview with the FAZ, Patzelt says that he is”in line”with the People’s Mujahideen.

It is a strange connection:

The MEK are based on a mixture of Islam and Communism. Dropouts, all of whom are rejected as agents of Iran, report torture and torture in the organization.

The Guardian recently spoke to about a dozen dropouts and reported that members were brainwashed. There is a cult-like atmosphere around the leader Maryam Rajavi and her probably long dead husband Massoud, who is kept alive externally by Rajavi. Rajavi leads the group from Paris.

She is president of the Iranian Exile Parliament.

Patzelt: Not a sect, but a monastic community

In the camp in Albania, women and men live separately. In the evenings, small groups meet with a commander for”ideological training”and to confess sexual thoughts, a former member of the British newspaper said.

The confession is used to create shame.

Sometimes the commander would say:”How do you want to achieve freedom for the Iranian people if you have an erection every day?”

Contact with relatives is prohibited, as is possession of a cell phone.

However, they are not isolated from the outside world: dozens of trolls spread propaganda online every day. Patzelt, a member of the Bundestag, cannot understand the accusation that the MEK is a sect. He sees living together more like a monastic community, who has submitted to the struggle for Iran and tough camp discipline.

The history of the People’s Mujahedin is complex:

the movement originated in the 1960s. They were instrumental in the fall of the Shah in 1979, but lost political supremacy within Iran. In the years that followed, they went underground, bombing Ali Khamenei among others. .. Thereupon the People’s Mujahideen fled to Iraq and fought side by side with Saddam Hussein in the war against his own countrymen. The Iraqi dictator equipped the Iranian fighters with weapons that they only had to surrender in 2003 with the invasion of the United States armed forces in Iraq.

Albania has been home to the People’s Mujahedeen since 2013 after being attacked several times in Iraq and no longer safe there. With the help of the United Nations, the United States and Saudi Arabia, the People’s Mujahedin were flown to the Muslim country in the Western Balkans until 2016. Nothing official is known about the contractual details. Albania is said to have entered into the deal under Washington’s mediation pressure and has received aid in the millions. Previously, Romania was also requested, which rejected the request. Observers in Albania are certain that the political officials have been greased for accommodating themselves. Corruption is common; Albania ranks 106th out of 180 on the corruption perception index.

A serious problem for many Albanians
Martin Patzelt, on the other hand, emphasizes that the reason for the admission is the hospitality of the Albanians. Together with Rita Süssmuth, the CDU politician visited the MEK camp in Albania in 2018. There Patzelt called”to put an end to the religious dictatorship in Iran”. The People’s Mujahideen live in Manza, about thirty kilometers from Tirana. * Inside there is said to be an infirmary, a wood workshop and a computer room.

An Albanian investigative journalist, who does not want to be named, says:

“Nobody in his country accepts a group of people who can commit terrorist attacks. You never know when they will be activated. ”She says that the possibility of getting weapons is not too difficult for MEK, especially in Albania.

There is hardly anyone under 50 among the People’s Mujahideen. Iran’s foreign intelligence agency is still targeting her. In America and Europe they were on the terror list for years. Among the members of the MEK, it is said in Albania, are mainly academics and well-trained engineers and doctors who joined the fighting units of the Iranian resistance decades ago. Their military clout is likely to be manageable. From a political perspective, the group enjoys little support in Iran.

Some observers even say that the People’s Mujahideen are”highly hated”in their homeland. Even Patzelt, a member of the Bundestag, considers the chance of one day toppling the Islamic Republic’s political system to be slim.

For many Albanians, the Iranians are a serious and permanent problem in their country. The presence of the MEK has been causing diplomatic disputes with Tehran for a long time. The Iranian ambassador had to leave the country in December 2018. The Albanian Foreign Minister cited”damage to national security”as the reason. In mid-January 2020, the Balkan state expelled two other diplomats from the country. They are accused of having planned attacks on the MEK and being connected to the killed Iranian General Soleimani. Soleimani led the Quds brigades operating abroad. The US Department of Defense welcomed the expulsion and warned at the same time:”The Iranian regime continues to use diplomatic institutions in Europe and elsewhere as protection, to start terrorist attacks, ”wrote a press spokeswoman on Twitter.
The killing of Soleimani had rated the government in Tirana positively. Albania is a NATO member and is firmly on Washington’s side. There is a George Bush Street in Tirana to testify to the deep friendship. Iran’s spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, on the other hand, recently spoke of a”very small but devilish state in Europe where Americans have made common cause with Iranian traitors”. The People’s Mujahideen are terrorists for the leadership in Tehran. The situation is different for the White House: Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his former security advisor John Bolton have spoken several times at group events. Giuliani told The Daily Beast earlier this year,”I am one of those who are convinced that there must be regime change in Iran. “For the People’s Mujahedeen, Trump’s election as president was a godsend. However, the prospect of moving to Tehran has not become more realistic since then.

Martin Franke, Frankfurter Allgemeine

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Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

The secret puppet masters behind Trump’s war on Iran

On May 6, President Trump vetoed a war powers bill specifying that he must ask Congress for authorization to use military force against Iran. Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of deadly sanctions and threats of war against Iran has seen no let-up, even as the U.S., Iran and the whole world desperately need to set aside our conflicts to face down the common danger of the Covid-19 pandemic.

So what is it about Iran that makes it such a target of hostility for Trump and the neocons? There are many repressive regimes in the world, and many of them are close U.S. allies, so this policy is clearly not based on an objective assessment that Iran is more repressive than Egypt, Saudi Arabia or other monarchies in the Persian Gulf.

The Trump administration claims that its “maximum pressure” sanctions and threats of war against Iran are based on the danger that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. But after decades of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and despite the U.S.’s politicization of the IAEA, the agency has repeatedly confirmed that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.

 

Medea Benjamin

If Iran ever did any preliminary research on nuclear weapons, it was probably during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when the U.S. and its allies helped Iraq to make and use chemical weapons that killed up to 100,000 Iranians. A 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, the IAEA’s 2015 “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues” and decades of IAEA inspections have examined and resolved every scrap of false evidence of a nuclear weapons program presented or fabricated by the CIA and its allies.

If, despite all the evidence, U.S. policymakers still fear that Iran could develop nuclear weapons, then adhering to the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), keeping Iran inside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and ensuring ongoing access by IAEA inspectors would provide greater security than abandoning the deal.

As with Bush’s false WMD claims about Iraq in 2003, Trump’s real goal is not nuclear non-proliferation but regime change. After 40 years of failed sanctions and hostility, Trump and a cabal of U.S. war hawks still cling to the vain hope that a tanking economy and widespread suffering in Iran will lead to a popular uprising or make it vulnerable to another U.S.-backed coup or invasion.

United Against a Nuclear Iran and the Counter Extremism Project

One of the key organizations promoting and pushing hostility towards Iran is a shadowy group called United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI). Founded in 2008, it was expanded and reorganized in 2014 under the umbrella of the Counter Extremism Project United (CEPU) to broaden its attacks on Iran and divert U.S. policymakers’ attention away from the role of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other U.S. allies in spreading violence, extremism and chaos in the greater Middle East.

UANI acts as a private enforcer of U.S. sanctions by keeping a “business registry” of hundreds of companies all over the world—from Adidas to Zurich Financial Services—that trade with or are considering trading with Iran. UANI hounds these companies by naming and shaming them, issuing reports for the media, and urging the Office of Foreign Assets Control to impose fines and sanctions. It also keeps a checklist of companies that have signed a declaration certifying they do not conduct business in or with Iran.

Proving how little they care about the Iranian people, UANI even targets pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical-device corporations—including Bayer, Merck, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Abbott Laboratories—that have been granted special U.S. humanitarian aid licenses.

 

Secretive MKO Cult Member Refuses to Talk to Peace Activists in DC

Where does UANI get its funds?

UANI was founded by three former U.S. officials, Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke and Mark Wallace. In 2013, it still had a modest budget of $1.7 million, nearly 80% coming from two Jewish-American billionaires with strong ties to Israel and the Republican Party: $843,000 from precious metals investor Thomas Kaplan and $500,000 from casino owner Sheldon Adelson. Wallace and other UANI staff have also worked for Kaplan’s investment firms, and he remains a key funder and advocate for UANI and its affiliated groups.

In 2014, UANI split into two entities: the original UANI and the Green Light Project, which does business as the Counter Extremism Project. Both entities are under the umbrella of and funded by a third, Counter Extremism Project United (CEPU). This permits the organization to brand its fundraising as being for the Counter Extremism Project, even though it still regrants a third of its funds to UANI.

CEO Mark Wallace, Executive Director David Ibsen and other staff work for all three groups in their shared offices in Grand Central Tower in New York. In 2018, Wallace drew a combined salary of $750,000 from all three entities, while Ibsen’s combined salary was $512,126.

In recent years, the revenues for the umbrella group, CEPU, have mushroomed, reaching $22 million in 2017. CEPU is secretive about the sources of this money. But investigative journalist Eli Clifton, who starting looking into UANI in 2014 when it was sued for defamation by a Greek ship owner it accused of violating sanctions on Iran, has found evidence suggesting financial ties with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

That is certainly what hacked emails between CEPU staff, an Emirati official and a Saudi lobbyist imply. In September 2014, CEPU’s president Frances Townsend emailed the UAE Ambassador to the U.S. to solicit the UAE’s support and propose that it host and fund a CEPU forum in Abu Dhabi.

Four months later, Townsend emailed again to thank him, writing, “And many thanks for your and Richard Mintz’ (UAE lobbyist) ongoing support of the CEP effort!” UANI fundraiser Thomas Kaplan has formed a close relationship with Emirati ruler Bin Zayed, and visited the UAE at least 24 times. In 2019, he gushed to an interviewer that the UAE and its despotic rulers “are my closest partners in more parts of my life than anyone else other than my wife.”

Another email from Saudi lobbyist and former Senator Norm Coleman to the Emirati Ambassador about CEPU’s tax status implied that the Saudis and Emiratis were both involved in its funding, which would mean that CEPU may be violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by failing to register as a Saudi or Emirati agent in the U.S.
Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy has documented the dangerously unaccountable and covert expansion of the influence of foreign governments and military-industrial interests over U.S. foreign policy in recent years, in which registered lobbyists are only the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to foreign influence. Eli Clifton calls UANI, “a fantastic case study and maybe a microcosm of the ways in which American foreign policy is actually influenced and implemented.”

CEPU and UANI’s staff and advisory boards are stocked with Republicans, neoconservatives and warhawks, many of whom earn lavish salaries and consulting fees. In the two years before President Trump appointed John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, CEPU paid Bolton $240,000 in consulting fees. Bolton, who openly advocates war with Iran, was instrumental in getting the Trump administration to withdraw from the nuclear deal.
UANI also enlists Democrats to try to give the group broader, bipartisan credibility. The chair of UANI’s board is former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, who was known as the most pro-Zionist member of the Senate. A more moderate Democrat on UANI’s board is former New Mexico governor and UN ambassador Bill Richardson.
Norman Roule, a CIA veteran who was the National Intelligence Manager for Iran throughout the Obama administration was paid $366,000 in consulting fees by CEPU in 2018. Soon after the brutal Saudi assassination of journalist Jamal Khassoghi, Roule and UANI fundraiser Thomas Kaplan met with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and Roule then played a leading role in articles and on the talk-show circuit whitewashing Bin Salman’s repression and talking up his superficial “reforms” of Saudi society.
More recently, amid a growing outcry from Congress, the UN and the European Union to ease U.S. sanctions on Iran during the pandemic, UANI chairman Joe Lieberman, CEPU president Frances Townsend and CEO Mark Wallace signed a letter to Trump that falsely claimed, “U.S. sanctions neither prevent nor target the supply of food, medicine or medical devices to Iran,” and begged him not to relax his murderous sanctions because of COVID-19. This was too much for Norman Roule, who tossed out his UANI script and told the Nation, “the international community should do everything it can to enable the Iranian people to obtain access to medical supplies and equipment.”

Two Israeli shell companies to whom CEPU and UANI have paid millions of dollars in “consulting fees” raise even more troubling questions. CEPU has paid over $500,000 to Darlink, located near Tel Aviv, while UANI paid at least $1.5 million to Grove Business Consulting in Hod Hasharon, about 10% of its revenues from 2016 to 2018. Neither firm seems to really exist, but Grove’s address on UANI’s IRS filings appears in the Panama Papers as that of Dr. Gideon Ginossar, an officer of an offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands that defaulted on its creditors in 2010.

Selling a corrupted picture to U.S. policymakers

UANI’s parent group, Counter Extremism Project United, presents itself as dedicated to countering all forms of extremism. But in practice, it is predictably selective in its targets, demonizing Iran and its allies while turning a blind eye to other countries with more credible links to extremism and terrorism.

UANI supports accusations by Trump and U.S. war hawks that Iran is “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism,” based mainly on its support for the Lebanese Shiite political party Hezbollah, whose militia defends southern Lebanon against Israel and fights in Syria as an ally of the government.

But Iran placed UANI on its own list of terrorist groups in 2019 after Mark Wallace and UANI hosted a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York that was mainly attended by supporters of the Mujahedin-e-Kalqh (MEK).

The MEK is a group that the U.S. government itself listed as a terrorist organization until 2012 and which is still committed to the violent overthrow of the government in Iran—preferably by persuading the U.S. and its allies to do it for them. UANI tried to distance itself from the meeting after the fact, but the published program listed UANI as the event organizer.

On the other hand, there are two countries where CEPU and UANI seem strangely unable to find any links to extremism or terrorism at all, and they are the very countries that appear to be funding their operations, lavish salaries and shadowy “consulting fees”: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Many Americans are still demanding a public investigation into Saudi Arabia’s role in the crimes of September 11. In a court case against Saudi Arabia brought by 9/11 victims’ families, the FBI recently revealed that a Saudi Embassy official, Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, provided crucial support to two of the hijackers. Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the families whose father was killed on September 11th, told Yahoo News, “(This) demonstrates there was a hierarchy of command that’s coming from the Saudi Embassy to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs [in Los Angeles] to the hijackers.”

The global spread of the Wahhabi version of Islam that unleashed and fueled Al Qaeda, ISIS and other violent Muslim extremist groups has been driven primarily by Saudi Arabia, which has built and funded Wahhabi schools and mosques all over the world. That includes the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles that the two 9/11 hijackers attended.

It is also well documented that Saudi Arabia has been the largest funder and arms supplier for the Al Qaeda-led forces that have destroyed Syria since 2011, including CIA-brokered shipments of thousands of tons of weapons from Benghazi in Libya and at least eight countries in Eastern Europe. The UAE also supplied arms funding to Al Qaeda-allied rebels in Syria between 2012 and 2016, and the Saudi and UAE roles have now been reversed in Libya, where the UAE is the main supplier of thousands of tons of weapons to General Haftar’s rebel forces. In Yemen, both the Saudis and Emiratis have committed war crimes. The Saudi and Emirati air forces have bombed schools, clinics, weddings and school buses, while the Emiratis tortured detainees in 18 secret prisons in Yemen.

But United Against a Nuclear Iran and Counter Extremism Project have redacted all of this from the one-sided worldview they offer to U.S. policymakers and the American corporate media. While they demonize Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood as extremists and terrorists, they depict Saudi Arabia and the UAE exclusively as victims of terrorism and allies in U.S.-led “counterterrorism” campaigns, never as sponsors of extremism and terrorism or perpetrators of war crimes.

The message of these groups dedicated to “countering extremism” is clear and none too subtle: Saudi Arabia and the UAE are always U.S. allies and victims of extremism, never a problem or a source of danger, violence or chaos. The country we should all be worrying about is—you guessed it—Iran. You couldn’t pay for propaganda like this! But on the other hand, if you’re Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates and you have greedy, corrupt Americans knocking on your door eager to sell their loyalty, maybe you can.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies ,  intrepidreport.com

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The United Sects of America: How cultists help to form of the US foreign policy
The cult of Rajavi

What are the United Sects of America?

The United States of America was the first country in the world to be built by sects. Representatives of the European persecution of Protestants settled in the New World to build their “city upon a hill”, a millenary Protestant utopia. It was a claim to build a new society, whose principles would extend to other nations in the future.
As time passed, American Protestantism, from Pentecostals to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, became important tools of American soft power.
Many remember the case of American Evangelical missionary Andrew Brunson, who was arrested in Turkey for espionage. During the investigation, facts emerged about his connection to the Mormon network of influence in Turkey, which was also connected to the American intelligence services.
However, it is not only American sects around the world that can be considered an instrument of influence by the US. The opposite trend has become more and more common: the United States has increasingly been working together with sects and cult groups aimed at overthrowing power in various countries. At the same time, at some point, it becomes difficult to see who is using whom.

The United Sects of America: How cultists help to form of the US foreign policy

FETÖ and the CIA

 

In July 2016, a coup attempt took place in Turkey. The poutchists who organized the underground structure in the army intended to destroy the country’s leadership, including President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However, because the patriots and Kemalists refused to support them, the mutineers’ plot failed. Turkish authorities, after the investigation started, said that the terrorist movement of Fethullah Gülen FETÖ was behind the attempted coup.

According to Turkish authorities, FETÖ was also behind the assassination of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov in 2016, and action aimed at preventing the normalization of Russian-Turkish relations. The attack was also linked to the terrorist “Kurdistan Workers Party”.
Previously, the Gülen movement was behind the high-profile “Ergenekon” case in the early 2000s. As the New York Times wrote “In 2005, years before the trials, a man affiliated with the Gülen movement approached Eric S.. Edelman, then the American ambassador, at a party in Istanbul and handed him an envelope containing a handwritten document that supposedly laid out a plan for an imminent coup”.
Ergenekon’s goal was to weaken the Turkish army and eliminate its military patriotic orientation, not oriented towards the United States.
Gülen almost came close to intercepting power in Turkey in the early 2000s, acting as an ally of the ruling Justice and Development Party, but his influence waned after 2013. His organization acted as a network of devotees, despite the self-created image of pure religious and humanitarian organization. The 2016 coup showed that under the mask was a “parallel state”.
Despite attempts by Gülen’s supporters to portray his movement as social, educational and democratic, it is in reality based on a cult of devotion to an autocratic leader and resembles a secret network. The organization is recognized as terrorist by Turkey, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Pakistan, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
At the time of the coup attempt, FETÖ was being governed from the US. Gülen himself received a green card in 2002. Since then, he has lived in the US. Interestingly, the FBI and the State Department opposed Gülen’s attempts to settle in the United States. But the CIA vouched for him.
CIA National Intelligence Council former vice chairman Graham E. Fuller, former CIA official George Fidas and former US Ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz wrote letters in support of Gülen’s green card. Turkey has now issued an arrest warrant against Füller and is seeking the extradition of Gülen, accusing them of organizing a coup d’état.
Gülen’s extradition is a major issue that is poisoning US-Turkey relations. However, the Americans refuse to extradite the ringleader of the Islamist structure. Many advocates of Gülen, including Graham E. Fuller himself, vehemently oppose the very possibility of reconciliation between the US and current Turkish leadership.
The Gülen organization has 156 charter schools in the US. He has ties with the US establishment, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. Gülenists heavily invest in the US, predominantly Democrats.
Falun Gong: Anti-Chinese propaganda
The Epoch Times Conservative media outlet has become very popular in the US over the past few years. For the average American, it looks like another pro-Trump media outlet: conservative, fervently supporting the current US president and all his policies, especially his criticism of China, its headquarters located in New York.
Recently, it actively spread the conspiracy theory that the new Coronavirus was created in biological laboratories in China. Last week, the media even began distributing a free issue of the Epoch Times newspaper, consisting of anti-Chinese propaganda of various kinds, in the United States and Canada.
However, there are no white protestant or conservative representatives of the Jewish community behind this media source as is the case with sources such as Breitbart News. The Epoch Times is the media arm of Falun Gong sect – a guru-centred movement with political ambitions banned in China. Its media empire in 2003 became the largest Chinese news system outside mainland China.
After Donald Trump came to power in the US with his fervent anti-Chinese rhetoric, the sect’s adherents began to aggressively influence the English-speaking audience. Today Epoch Media Group includes The Epoch Times newspaper and NTD TV channels (New Tang Dynasty Television).
NBC News reported in 2019 that former Falun Gong cult members believe the end of the world is coming. They believe that “communists” will be sent to a kind of hell, and that President Trump is an ally in the fight against communism.
In 1999, the Chinese government banned Falun Gong. By then, the cult had thousands of adherents all over China, united in faith in the coming apocalypse, the coming of aliens, special spiritual techniques and unconditional submission to its leader, Li Hongzhi.
Falun Gong has all the signs of a totalitarian sectarian movement and is very similar to Aum Shinrikyo, another Asian (Japanese doomsday cult), whose followers carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995.
Former Chief Strategist of White House Steve Bannon teamed up with Falun Gong filming the propagandist movie “Claws of The Red Dragon”.

 

The MEK: the ‘good terrorists’

A description of the US administration’s ties to sects would not have been complete without reference to The People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, or the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). Formally, it is a left-wing political movement. In fact, it has long since degenerated into the personality cult of the leader – Maryam Rajavi.
The MEK was created back in the 1960s. In the 1970s, its members organized several terrorist acts against Americans in Iran. They supported the Islamic Revolution in 1979, but then disagreed with the Islamic clergy, and began a campaign of terror.
The victims of MEK’s terror were Iran’s second president Mohammad-Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad Javad Bahonar in 1980. In all, several dozen high-ranking Iranians were killed at the hands of MEK members.
During the Iran-Iraq war, MEK members betrayed Iran and took the side of Saddam Hussein. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, MEK members who were on the base in Iraq were “inherited” by the US.
From 1997 to 2012, the US listed MEK as a terrorist organization. Back in 2009 RAND Corporation in the report ordered by the US government said MEK has “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 labor, sleep deprivation, physical abuse and limited exit options.
In 2012, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh revealed the scheme of how US Joint Special Operations Command trained MEK militants in 2005-2009. At that time the structure was considered a terrorist organization in the US.
In 2016, the US paid for the relocation of 3,000 MEK members from Iraq to Albania, a Balkan country absolutely loyal to Washington.
At various times, former National Security Adviser to President Trump John Bolton and Trump’s close friend and personal attorney Rudy Giuliani addressed MEK leadership.
The Iranian “mujahideen” are waging an active information war against Iran and possibly used for intelligence by the United States. However, MEK propaganda is aimed not only at Iran, but also at the United States. This structure lobbies the most harsh policies towards Iran.
This is how “Heshmat Alavi” appeared, a group of MEK activists that wrote texts under a pseudonym for Forbes, The Diplomat, The Hill, The Daily Caller, The Federalist and the English edition of Al Arabiya’s website. One of the articles written by this team of authors was used by the White House to justify the imposition of new anti-Iranian sanctions.
There was also information that MEK was giving money to Rudy Giuliani.
MEK and its subsidiary, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, have openly advocated a change of power in Iran, promising to establish democracy and the rule of law. At the same time, inside MEK itself, there is truly totalitarian order, and the members of the sect are under the constant control of the leadership, their whole life is regulated.

The tail wags the dog

FETÖ, Falun Gong and MEK are working with the US to fight against legitimate governments around the world. At the same time, the US is not ashamed to use organizations whose structure does not comply with any principles of democracy or human dignity, hypocritically claiming to fight for human rights.
The fact that the US has found best friends in the three most important areas in the face of totalitarian sects says a lot about the US leadership itself. It understands that only sectarians with brainwashed minds can confront sovereign Turkey or Iran and China. On the other hand, sectarians are usually willing to do anything, and asking Americans for their help is a dangerous sign.
But cooperation with sects is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are an instrument of American imperialism. On the other hand, lobbying, bribery of officials, frantic activity in the media, promotion of their “experts” shape American policy in line with these cults’ strategies.
How will US policy toward Iran be built if the voices of MEK’s allies are loudest? Will Washington be able to come to a truce with Beijing if Falun Gong forms a negative image of China among Trump supporters? If Fethullah Gülen’s friends and devoted activists of his sect constantly appear in the American media and bombard them with the ideas of their CIA friends, what will be the American policy towards Turkey?
The answers to these questions are obvious. By working with cults, Washington may soon become a dog being wagged by its own tail.

United World International(uwidata.com)

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MEK terrorists in Albania
Albania

Criminals And Terrorists In Albania

In Albania, the growth of the democratic state proceeds slowly, hampered by an economic crisis that is difficult to overcome and the security and legal problems that afflict the country. We address them in this report by Polo de donno.

SPREAD OF RADICAL ISLAMIST TERRORISM: The spread of Jihadism in the Balkans, and more particularly in Albania, cannot be framed within a generalized scheme of action but is based on specific dynamics that relate to the weakness of the state control structures of certain regional entities. As Giovanni Giacalone explains on “InsideOver”, where the state is socio-economically weak and lacking or absent in the activity of monitoring the territory, terrorist cells find fertile ground. In the case of Albania it was thought that the doctrine of state atheism, imposed by Hoxha in 1967, would discourage the formation of radical religious cells; in reality, this belief is not corroborated by the facts as is doubtful the opposite thesis, which sees the emergence of a jihadist hotbed as an equal reaction and contrary to Hoxha’s vision. More likely, Giacalone continues, these cells were indirectly fostered by the climate of religious tolerance that communist intervention fostered, within a Muslim-majority community but with a good presence of Catholics, Orthodox and Bektashi. It can be said that the climate of mutual tolerance has fostered the blurring of the priority role of religion in favor of the concept of nationhood or “albanianity”. Radical Islamism in Albania is a phenomenon of an exogenous nature, stimulated by the religious currents of the Gulf, which aim to spread Wahhabism and Salafism through cash funding of mosques or cultural centers and the indoctrination of local imams. As Giacalone explains, the Albanian Islamic community has always worked with the security forces to remove the most radical fringes; on the other hand, however, there is the problem of the most ardent hate preachers who, through the web and the unrecognized Islamic centers, spread the most radical messages of Wahabism and Salafism (messages of intolerance and malfeasance). In 2014 there was a major police operation that killed a jihadist network of ISIS recruiters led by the two Albanian imams Genci Balla and Bujar Hysa. The areas where proselytizing of these radical sectors is concentrated are included on the Albanian periphery: Elbasan, Cerrik, Kavaja, Librazhd, Pogradec, Scutari, as well as the outskirts of Tirana. As we have seen in France, in the terrible recent period of the ISIS massacres, the subjects targeted by the jihadist propaganda recruiters are young people in precarious economic and social conditions (the kind of poor individual of the Parisian banlieues). Another source of Islamist infiltration in the country is Erdogan’s Turkey, which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which uses its cultural and political power; it happened, as Giacalone reports, with the construction of the largest mosque in the Balkans in Tirana (about 32,000 square meters), where the Imams give sermons identical to those of the countries of origin, with strong political as well as ideological-religious tints.

Female operators in ISIS and MEK, victims of destructive cults

Secondly, since 2016 the headquarters of the People’s Mujahedin-e of Iran (MEK) has been established on Albanian soil in Manez, near Durres; Historically, this group had supported the struggle against the Shah in 1963 and then participated in the Khomeinist revolution of 1979. From an ideological point of view, it is a synthesis of Marxism, feminism and Islamism, positions that have distanced the group from the ayatollahs and brought it closer to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. It had been blacklisted by the EU, US, Canada and Britain before being delisted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during Obama’s first presidential term. Seen on the American side as the bearer of democracy and freedom in Iran and on the contrary side in Tehran as a terrorist organisation, it is certainly an extremely inconvenient tenant for Albania, especially in a context of multi-ethnicity such as the Balkan one. As reported in an article by Margherita Furlan in the magazine “Antimafia 2000”, the MEK is strongly supported by the American secret services: for what objective and with what tasks? Some Albanian political sources have suggested an exchange: since “the Americans gave us Kosovo, now we have to give them something in return”.

Canadian-Albanian historian Olsi Jazexhi even suggested that “America wanted to turn Albania into a safe haven for international jihadism, a second Afghanistan in the heart of Europe.

” It is estimated that there are about 4400 members of the MEK in Albania, with a group of militants (according to an Al-Jazeera documentary) trained in the techniques of computer-led anti-Iran misinformation and diversion objectives. It would be a “cyber-jihad” as Furlan says, aimed at spreading false news both in Iran and in Europe in order to discredit the regime in Tehran as a possible negotiator.

According to an article dated 2015, which appeared in the Huffington Post, Albania would become a sorting center for jihadists from neighboring countries, including Italy; In fact, the Salafist nuclei present in the district of Librazdhi and Elbasan for years have been offering support and hospitality to volunteers who arrived by air or sea (at the port of Durres), heading to Syria after transiting through Turkey.

FOREIGN FIGHTERS: In the field of terrorist threat analysis, the crucial problem for the Balkan country is that of so-called “foreign fighters”. As we know, the outbreak of the war in Syria in 2011 has had an effect and repercussions not only on neighbouring Arab countries but also on the Balkan peninsula. In a 2019 article on “InsideOver”, Giovanni Giacalone explains how such a mobilization of Balkan foreign fighters for a distant conflict had never been seen in history; a sign of the propaganda capacity of jihadism on the peninsula. We must divide the phenomenon of fighters abroad between round-trip trips. It is estimated that Albania has mobilized about 180-200 jihadist foreign fighters, about half as many as in Kosovo; Given the figure of a population of 2,873 million, it can be argued that the country has managed the problem of terrorist flows to the outside world well. The “Country report on terrorism”, compiled by the US State Department in 2018, explains how Albania, thanks to high-level collaboration with US agencies, has achieved good results, certified by the Personal Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation System (Pisces) to protect Albanian borders, in addition to controls in maritime and airport nodes. If we look at the Balkan region as a whole, more than a thousand people have started out since the outbreak of the war in Syria, of whom 67% are men, 15% women and 18% children. Of these, 260 fighters have died in theatres of war, 500 are still in Syria and Iraq, and about 460 have returned to their countries of origin. The latter figure makes the western Balkan region the area with the highest number of “return” fighters. The phenomenon remained confined to Kosovo, Albania, Northern Macedonia and Bosnia, with a small group of Albanian militants still engaged in the Syrian scenario; However, the impact should not be underestimated because, as Giacalone argues, individuals returning from Syria and Iraq may have been more or less deeply involved in Isis and Al-Qaeda. For example, the wife of a jihadist may have played a negligible role compared to a husband fully involved in terrorist operations; just as we must not overlook the level of indoctrination that minors may have suffered, some of whom were even involved in the execution of prisoners.

Although Albania, more than other fellow travellers in the Balkans, seems to have contained the threat of Islamic terrorism (neglecting the Iranian group mentioned above, of which there is no well-defined profile), also through the use of US prevention systems, on the other hand it is necessary to keep under close surveillance places of worship as possible vehicles of political messages or intolerant religious radicalism and also the role of the Internet, a tool capable of making criminal information fluid, rapid and difficult to trace.

CRIMINAL GROUPS: A LOOK AT THE ROUTES OF THE CRIME: As indicated in the report on crime hot spots in the Western Balkans in 2019, this region presents itself as a vital hub in the trafficking of drugs, weapons and human beings. In fact, it is located between the largest opium producer, Afghanistan, and the largest heroin market, Western Europe. It is also becoming an important point of access and exchange for cocaine, as well as a place of marijuana production (Albanian plantations). First of all, the trafficking of heroin is moving along the so-called ‘Balkan Route’, which originates in Afghanistan and, after transit through Turkey, is spread into Europe by the Balkan countries. This route then is divided into a track that goes from Albania and Montenegro to Italy and a second passage from Northern Macedonia and Serbia to Central Europe (Austria, Switzerland, Slovakia, Hungary). A second route is that of cocaine trafficking, which sees Albania and Montenegro as links to the criminal chain between South America and Europe. Ships usually arrive in Durres (Albania) and Bar (Montenegro), then send the goods to Kosovo and Serbia and from there trade it in Central Europe. As far as cannabis is concerned, as we have mentioned, Albania has become the largest producer in the region; The main destinations for cannabis shipments are the Italian ports of Brindisi, Bari and Otranto, while Greece and Turkey are at lower levels. Finally, with regard to synthetic drugs, the Balkans are the recipient of cargoes from the Netherlands; local production in Bosnia and Serbia is the exception. We must not forget the illegal trade in cigarettes, in which Montenegro has an absolutely important role; In fact, through the port hub of Bar, it smuggles cigarettes with official or fake marks to Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In the arms trade, Albania is distinguished by its trade with the Sicilian Mafia, which is the most frequent of its customers. The analysis of these “hot zones” is divided around three pillars: 1) the geographical location of the region, the transit point of such criminal trading especially through airport, port and isolated border areas; 2) the economic vulnerability of some countries makes it easy to infiltrate a poor infrastructure, characterised by very high unemployment (long-term and especially youth), emigration and consequent problems of a socio-psychological nature; 3) a weak state government, often implicated in illegal or corrupt activities, connoted by a poor territorial grip and the typical arrangement of countries not fully developed or even backward.

A SNAPSHOT OF THE MAIN ALBANIAN MAFIOSO GROUPS: From the mapping carried out in 2019 by “Antimafia Two Thousand ” emerges the accurate territorial location of the most important Albanian criminal groups. Three structured criminal organisations operate in Tirana, which has been strengthened since the fall of the Hoxha regime thanks in part to corrupt links with local politics and entrepreneurship. Some are involved in laundering the proceeds of mafia activities; others manage drug trafficking, extortion and debt collection on behalf of third parties; finally, there are those who make investments in catering and the exploitation of chromium deposits, which are particularly flourishing in Albania. Not only that, but the city is also an important back office for operations abroad, especially in the Netherlands, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Italy and Kosovo. In Scutari there are at least four major mafias involved in the trafficking of drugs, organs, weapons and human beings. The main activity of these groups is the production and trade of cannabis, an area in which they could achieve primacy in the region in a few years’ time. This role is played by the bordering proximity with the Montenegrin groups, with which the Albanians have forged strong ties, and with the Kosovars. Durazzo, on the other hand, not only represents a decisive port issue in the dense criminal network that brings cocaine from South America to Europe, but also offers a vast landscape of criminal investments in the hotel industry, in the trade of stolen cars and also in many social and political activities. The families of the Caushi, Kakami and Gaxhai, currently at war with each other for control of the territory, have settled in Valona. Murders have been numerous in recent years precisely because of the struggle for supremacy in the international routes of the arms and narcotics trade, especially towards Spain and Italy. In Fier we see more qualitatively refined groups not so much in the type of criminal activity (extortion and drug trafficking) as in the bond that unites them, based not only on the blood but also on the community of belonging (Kosovar and Cham). To understand the excellent links of these groups, it is enough to think that in 2017 Arjan Shanaj was arrested in Greece carrying cocaine from a Colombian cartel. In Berat, the three elements present share the criminal market slices in the tourism sector, having entered into some sort of agreement between them. On the contrary, Elbasan has a strong conflict between criminal groups, certified by the high number of murders in recent times; This certifies a high degree of criminal activity in the city despite the dismantling of the So-called Mandela and Tan Kateshi. It is estimated that the two most powerful groups in Albania are involved in the trafficking of cocaine across Western Europe and the United Kingdom.

After a leopard-spot description of this type and the certainty of facing a well-established and highly integrated criminal phenomenon with the main illegal hubs from Latin America to the Far East (we also remember the so-called “Golden Triangle” of drugs between Laos, Burma and China), we can affirm the structural link between the scourge of terrorist-mafia lawlessness and the weak state presence on the territory, especially with regard to the functions of control and administration of the population. Where the crisis of the socio-economic fabric (unemployment, low income, low reliability of the public accounts of the country of reference) is settling with the lack of transparency in the procedures and with a flourishing counter-state activity of mafias and terrorists, able to offer an alternative (albeit criminal) to the poorest strata, will always find fertile ground in a black economy, made up of deception, fraud, corruption and wretched trafficking.

By Paolo de Donno, europeanaffairs – Translated by Iran Interlink

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EU_VOX_Spain
Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

The MEK terrorists’ creed for recruitment of Eurodeputies

The next elections to the European Parliament will take place in two weeks and never before have the elections been labelled so decisive by so many European leaders. Many things have changed since the previous elections of 2015 won by centre-right liberal-conservative and centre-left social-democratic parties. Millions of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa have fled to Europe, thus causing the ongoing migrant crisis, and tens of European cities have been hit by terrorist attacks, leaving hundreds of civilians dead. All this has resulted in fueling people’s fears about the security, as well as in growing popularity of far-right populist, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic political parties. Numerous political analysts are predicting the success of such parties in the upcoming elections in late May.

EU_VOX_Spain

One particularly interesting example of far-right populism recently emerged in Spain, a country in which the centre-right and centre-left have been exchanging in government for decades. However, in December last year Spain saw a noisy irruption of Vox, a hitherto marginal extreme right party, into mainstream political life. The Vox won almost 11% of the popular vote in the regional election in Andalusia, the most populous and the second largest autonomous community in the country, gaining 12 seats and entering a regional parliament for the first time. The latest polls show that Vox will win 10-13% of national votes in the upcoming elections, in other words, 6-8 secured seats in the European Parliament.

Santiago Abascal, the Vox party leader, built his campaign on a platform of Euro-scepticism, anti-feminism, xenophobia, and exacerbated Spanish nationalism. The transatlantic extreme right political guru Steve Bannon sees Vox as a valuable part of his global ideological crusade against the”liberal elite”and”cultural Marxism.”In April, the Vox launched its election campaign in the tiny town of Covadonga, sometimes referred to as the”cradle of Spain.”According to the historical narrative of Spanish conservatives, Covadonga was the site of the first victory by Christian Hispania against Spain’s then-Muslim rulers, and the start of the Reconquista, the 780-year process of reclaiming Iberian lands for Christendom.”Europe is what it is thanks to Spain, thanks to our contribution of stopping the spread and the expanse of Islam,”Vox’s vice secretary of international relations Iván Espinosa de los Monteros said. One of the party’s earliest controversies was a wildly Islamophobic video conjuring a future in which Muslims had imposed sharia in southern Spain, turning the Cathedral of Córdoba back into a mosque. Javier Ortega Smith, the Vox secretary general, was recently investigated by Spanish prosecutors for hate speech after he spoke of an”Islamist invasion”that was the”enemy of Europe.”

Given Vox’s staunch Islamophobia, independent observers were surpised several months ago when El País newspaper revealed that Vox’s emergence is intimately linked to Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian cult bitterly opposed to the current government of Iran. Only in the early 1980s, the MEK conducted over three hundred terrorist attacks against targets in Iran, and in total more than 16,000 people have been killed in Iran alone, not counting their atrocities against Iranian and Iraqi civilians during the aggressions of MEK’s ally Saddam Hussein. Mujahedin-e Khalq has also conducted attacks against numerous Western targets, in Europe, North America and elsewhere. The organization is designated as a terrorist organization by Iran and Iraq, and was on European Union’s terrorist list until 2009 and on the US terrorist list until 2012. Reason for delisting lies in the long-term lobbying by MEK’s leading sponsors, namely US neocons, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who see the organization as a useful tool for political pressure against Iran.

The Vox-MEK link goes beyond any ideological affinity that might exist between the two groups. According to an investigation on Vox’ finances conducted by El País, a leading Spanish newspaper, in 2014 Vox received a donation of 500.000 euros from the MEK. The money reportedly came via thousands of contributions ranging from 200 to 5000 euros from individual members and sympathisers of the MEK. This money allowed the party to kick-start its election campaign for the European Parliament. The person who played a key role in securing this funding was Alejo Vidal-Quadras Roca, a veteran Spanish politician who served as a vice-president of the European Parliament from 2004 to 2014, and then became one of the founders of Vox. During his years as a vice-president, Vidal-Quadras Roca was the most influential MEK lobbyist in the EP, leading the cross-party group”Friends of Free Iran”which acted mostly as a mouthpiece for the MEK. On numerous occasions, he also hosted the MEK”president-elect”Maryam Rajavi in the European Parliament. A self-professed”defender of the West,”Vidal-Quadras Roca was lobbying on behalf of an organisation that was responsible for terrorist attacks on Westerners.

The Vox party did not make it to the EP in 2014, and Vidal-Quadras Roca eventually parted ways with the party in 2015. He still spends a lot of time in Brussels, however, continuing to promote the MEK. His abandonment of a party does not mean that the Vox-MEK ties have been severed. Rafael Bardají, a radical Zionist and Vox member since 2018, recently joined advocating Trump’s”maximum pressure”policy against Iran. Current leaders of Vox insist that they no longer receive any funding from foreign sources, and that the party is supported exclusively by small Spanish firms and crowdfunding. El País and independent analysts dispute such statements, emphasizing the Vox’s financial strength which has enabled them to acquire real estate, hire new personnel, pay lawyers to file complaints and petitions against the government, etc. Even former party leaders accuse the current leadership of running financially opaque operations, falling far short of satisfying legal standards for transparency.

Analysts have so far focused only on individual connections between the MEK and local national parties like Vox, what they are missing is the wider picture of the MEK mercenary network, stretching all over Europe. Taking into account the MEP attendees at the Rajavi-led”Friends of a Free Iran”(FoFI) meetings over the past year and a half, this informal group of pro-MEK terrorist advocates includes Heinz K. Becker (Austria), Mark Demesmaeker, Gérard Deprez (Belgium), Jozo Radoš and Ruža Tomašić (Croatia), Jaromír Štětina, Pavel Telička, Jan Zahradil (Czech Republic), Tunne Kelam (Estonia), Petri Sarvamaa (Finland), José Bové, Robert Rochefort (France), Stefan Eck (Germany), Patrizia Toia (Italy), Laima Andrikienė (Lithuania), Jim Nicholson (Northern Ireland), Ryszard Czarnecki, Anna Fotyga, Janusz Wojciechowski (Poland), José Inácio Faria (Portugal), Pál Csáky, Eduard Kukan, Ivan Štefanec, Anna Záborská (Slovakia), Franc Bogovič, Milan Zver (Slovenia), Teresa Giménez Barbat, Beatriz Becerra, Jordi Solé i Ferrando (Spain), David Campbell Bannerman, Anthea McIntyre, and Julie Ward (United Kingdom).

Thirty-two advocates do not belong to any specific EP political group or affiliation, they are conservative, liberal, green, and so on. Three-quarters of them come from smaller EU members, half from Eastern Europe, one-eighth from the Balkans. Among those from the five main EU member states, all are relatively unknown and belong to the opposition parties or independent. Obviously, the MEK’s purchasing a prominent MEP of a serious party and country represents an issue, not only due to price but also international repercussions. On the other hand, dealing with cheap marginal figures from the European periphery does not pose any problem.

The collective strength of such peripheral lobbyists can be sufficiently explained by the fact that MEK, a terrorist group responsible for more civilian casualties than ISIL, currently holds roughly five percent of the European Parliament. Taken as a national entity, it’s the seventh most represented member, after five main members and Poland. With the growing popularity of pro-US and pro-Israeli populist parties in Eastern and Southern Europe, it can be expected that the MEK’s representation will no longer be limited to individuals but to entire parties (like Vox), and that their share in the EP could even increase.

Filip Vuković – balkanspost

Filip Vuković is a Serbian politologist and investigative journalist from Belgrade, covering the western Balkan area for Serbian, English and Italian outlets. His focus is on nationalism, ethnic tensions and economic policy in the post-Yugoslav area. Currently, he is preparing a PhD dissertation at the University of Padua.

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mek - coronavirus-albania
Albania

Coronavirus gives Albanian PM Edi Rama unique opportunity to control MEK

A petition addressed to Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama has reached over ten thousand signatures. The petition was created by estranged families who need help to contact their loved ones trapped in the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) cult’s closed camp ‘Ashraf 3’ in Albania. The families are demanding that PM Rama ensures they get this contact. Now with the global coronavirus pandemic affecting Albania as elsewhere, they are even more urgently concerned to have news about the fate of their loved ones.

Nejat Society families' petition

http://chng.it/GCPbBfFPGr

The families have tried for decades to find ways to have news of their relatives – including taking the dangerous journey to the gates of MEK’s Camp Ashraf in Iraq after the 2003 defeat of Saddam Hussein. The MEK’s policy of forced divorce and separation of families has meant this has not been possible. It was hoped that the move to the more open western country Albania might give the families a better chance to visit their loved ones. Unfortunately, after 2016, the Trump administration allowed the MEK to corral the ordinary members back inside a closed and isolated camp in Manez, Durres county, where they are kept incommunicado.

In addition to the Trump administration’s support for the MEK, the government of Albania also capitulated to the MEK leaders’ demands, turning a blind eye to the conditions of modern slavery which characterise this group. Indeed, although they are said to be refugees, neither the government of Albania nor the UNHCR take any responsibility for the MEK members. Ex-members appealing for help are told by the UNHCR and the Interior Ministry that their existence in Albania is governed by an agreement that allows the MEK to take charge of all the people transferred from Iraq; they are entirely reliant on support from the MEK itself. This suits leader Maryam Rajavi very well. It is imperative for her to exert total control over the members since she has re-purposed her former combatants in Iraq to keyboard warriors in Albania where the MEK now runs a notorious click farm. Rajavi does whatever she can to prevent the members from leaving, no matter their state of health or willingness to work.

In the petition, the families – the elderly parents, siblings, cousins and children of the members – have appealed to Edi Rama to be granted visas to travel to Albania to search for their loved ones.

These have so far been refused. But preventing the members from having contact with their families is just one element in a panoply of tactics designed to prevent defections. The MEK members have been denied the identity papers, travel documents and work permits which would enable them to live independently. This means that those who have managed to leave the MEK cannot work, cannot get a driving license and cannot even open a bank account to allow their families to transfer funds to cover their basic sustenance. These conditions of forced dependence are all part of a deliberate scheme to close every possible door to help from outside the MEK.

But the blatant human rights and justice implications of hosting a slave camp on its territory that has been largely swept under the carpet by corrupt politicians and media in Albania, has now become an urgent matter because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The MEK members did not choose to live in Albania but were brought en masse under an agreement between the MEK, U.S., Albania and the UNHCR. Once in Albania they were herded into the camp and kept isolation there. In Albania, there is a refusal at government and local level to acknowledge them as individual people and grant them rights – they are dealt with only as a group.

mek - coronavirus-albania

According to investigative journalist Gjergji Thanasi, who reports from Durres county where MEK is based, and where the worst of the coronavirus outbreak has been recorded, the Albanian Ministry of Health “deals with Camp Ashraf 3 as if it does not exist. There is not a single line in the Durres Municipality health officials’ paperwork written about the camp and its residents. No Albanian health official has ever entered the camp.” The group is therefore inaccessible and unaccountable. This means that no matter how hard epidemiologists may be working to trace the contacts of positive cases throughout the country, the MEK will not submit to allow Health Ministry staff inside the camp to test or treat the individuals there. Based on its past behaviour, the MEK is also unlikely to register deaths inside the camp as COVID-19 related as this would itself force the involvement of the local health authorities. This makes the group an unsafe entity for the general citizenship of Albania and in particular the residents of Manez and the greater Durres county, the epicentre for the virus in that country.

This is a thorny issue for PM Rama. On one hand he must kowtow to the demands of the Trump administration which continues to support the MEK. President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo have been happy to use MEK disinformation and propaganda emanating from the troll farm in Camp Ashraf to boost their anti-Iran agendas.

On the other hand, Albania’s aspirations to join the European Union are hampered in part by the MEK presence there. The EU’s tolerance of the MEK ran out in 2018 when an alleged bomb plot brought the MEK’s conflict with Iran to the heart of Europe, forcing France, Belgium, Denmark and Germany to look afresh at the security implications of allowing the MEK a free rein in their countries.

As a result, MEK leader Maryam Rajavi was obliged to relocate to a new headquarters in Albania, and MEK activities in the EU were severely curtailed, particularly public demonstrations and gatherings. As long as the MEK remain in Albania, the EU will not accept them returning through the back door by allowing Albania to join the union.

In a strange way then, the pandemic offers an opportunity for PM Rama to address this issue once and for all. To deal with the MEK not as a political or terrorist problem but instead as a social problem. The petition of the families points to an obvious solution to this problem: allow the families of MEK members to make contact with them and help them individually. But this relies on the acknowledgement of government that MEK poses a threat to Albanian society, along with the willingness to deal decisively with them. This is possible. But will PM Rama have the courage and wisdom to take this opportunity?

iranian.com

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Maryam Rajavi
Mujahedin Khalq as an Opposition Group

Terrorists, Cultists, or Iran’s champion of ‎democracy? ‎

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 favorites of Trump White House hardliners.
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 Mohammadi’s 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 organization 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.

Somaye Mohammadi PArents

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.

Somaye Mohamamdi

Mostafa Mohammadi: MEK holds my daughter hostage, assaulted and terrorized me in Tirana

“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.
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 sympathizers. 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 labor, 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 organization – 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 Ames 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 behavior 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.

 

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MEK Terrorists
Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

US supported MEK terrorists kidnapped Iranians as slave workers

Request for the Release of Workers from Captivity of Terrorism
…from the Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism (ADVT), Iran

[ Editor’s Note: This ADVT submitted piece slipped by me with all the virus news we were buried under.

We support ADVT because they aren’t quitters. They know the US and Western media will usually ignore them, so as not to piss off their respective Intel agencies, but the ADVT people soldier on anyway, just like we would.

Sure these unfortunate Iranians were grabbed back in Saddam’s day when he was the US’ good buddy, but nothing has really been done for them up to now. ADVT is needling the UN, but the UN is weaker now than it has ever been, with the US ignoring any agreement it has ever signed at the cue of our political gangster class (which BTW does not include all of them).

With the world turning upside down with the Covid scourge, and inside out with the impending global recession descending upon us, it will be even tougher to save the last MEK slaves in Albania.
It has already sold its soul on this sad event and does not dare piss the US off now and risk whatever gravy train it is getting to not interfere in MEK business … Jim W. Dean ]

The Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism (ADVT) has called on the international community, International Labor Organization, and international organizations to help end decades of captivity of workers in the terrorist organization of the Hypocrites (Mojahedine-e Khalq – (MEK)).

For many years, the phenomenon of terrorism has gone beyond war, violence and killing people. Under the pretext of providing jobs and better lives in other countries, it deceives job seekers and enslaves them, which are other manifestations of modern slavery.

One of these violations of workers’ rights occurred during the reign of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, when Mojahedine-e Khalq terrorist group deceived job seekers by promising them to find new jobs, education and a better life in Europe. They told the workers that the office of the company is in Baghdad and transferred them to Iraq.

Then, the workers were captive in the organizational jail of the terrorist group and their identification documents were confiscated. So, the terrorist cult prevented them from leaving the camp and the captivity and slavery continued.

Bad social conditions and critical situations will lead to terrorist groups’ extreme abuse to recruit people. For example, in the current critical situation which has led to economic recession and unemployment of many workers, this process will increase.

UN Secretary-General said on Monday “extremist groups are taking advantage of COVID-19 lockdowns to intensify social media efforts to spread hatred and recruit young people who are spending more time online.”
Before the pandemic of COVID-19 he had said “One of every five young people was not getting an education, training or working, and one of every four was affected by violence or conflict. And he lamented that every year, 12 million girls become mothers when they are still children.”

Human rights organizations and international worker rights advocacy organizations have made great efforts to defend the rights of workers, but the issue of the damage of terrorism to the working class, especially deceiving them under the pretext of job placement, is still being overlooked.

Accordingly, International Labor Day will be an important opportunity for the relevant institutions to address this fundamental problem of the working class and other similar issues all over the world.

Commemorating International Labor Day and extending its sympathy to the families of those affected by terrorism, the Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism calls on international, regional and national organizations and bodies to take the following measures to end the long captivity of the Iranian workers in the Mujahedin-e Khalq (the Hypocrites) terrorist organization in Albania and other similar cases in other parts of the world and prevent the recurrence of such deceptions.

ADVT calls on,
The International Labor Organization, in cooperation with other relevant bodies, especially the United Nations, to have a specific plan to release the captive workers in the terrorist cult of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (the Hypocrites) in Albania.
The International Labor Organization to take precautionary measures to prevent the recurrence of such frauds under the pretext of job replacement.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, in cooperation with the World Health Organization, to send a delegation to Albania to visit and ensure the health of the captive workers in the Mujahedin-e Khalq (the Hypocrites) terrorist cult in the critical situation of COVID-19 pandemic.

By Jim W. Dean, Managing Editor – Veterans Today

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Netanyahu-Israel
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Mossad And MEK Role in Fabrication of Nuclear Documents against Iran

An investigation of supposed Iranian nuclear documents presented in a dramatically staged Netanyahu press conference indicates they were an Israeli fabrication designed to trigger US military conflict with Iran.

President Donald Trump scrapped the nuclear deal with Iran and continued to risk war with Iran based on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim to have proven definitively that Iran was determined to manufacture nuclear weapons. Netanyahu not only spun Trump but much of the corporate media as well, duping them with the public unveiling of what he claimed was the entire secret Iranian “nuclear archive.”

In early April 2018, Netanyahu briefed Trump privately on the supposed Iranian nuclear archive and secured his promise to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That April 30, Netanyahu took the briefing to the public in a characteristically dramatic live performance in which he claimed Israel’s Mossad intelligence services had stolen Iran’s entire nuclear archive from Tehran. “You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons…” Netanyahu declared. “Well, tonight, I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time.”

Netanyahu-Israel

However, an investigation of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents by The Grayzone reveals them to be the product of an Israeli disinformation operation that helped trigger the most serious threat of war since the conflict with Iran began nearly four decades ago. This investigation found multiple indications that the story of Mossad’s heist of 50,000 pages of secret nuclear files from Tehran was very likely an elaborate fiction and that the documents were fabricated by the Mossad itself.

According to the official Israeli version of events, the Iranians had gathered the nuclear documents from various locations and moved them to what Netanyahu himself described as “a dilapidated warehouse” in southern Tehran. Even assuming that Iran had secret documents demonstrating the development of nuclear weapons, the claim that top secret documents would be held in a nondescript and unguarded warehouse in Central Tehran is so unlikely that it should have raised immediate alarm bells about the story’s legitimacy.

Even more problematic was the claim by a Mossad official to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman that Mossad knew not only in what warehouse its commandos would find the documents but precisely which safes to break into with a blowtorch. The official told Bergman the Mossad team had been guided by an intelligence asset to the few safes in the warehouse contained the binders with the most important documents. Netanyahu bragged publicly that “very few” Iranians knew the location of the archive; the Mossad official told Bergman “only a handful of people” knew.

But two former senior CIA official, both of whom had served as the agency’s top Middle East analyst, dismissed Netanyahu’s claims as lacking credibility in responses to a query from The Grayzone.

According to Paul Pillar, who was National Intelligence Officer for the region from 2001 to 2005, “Any source on the inside of the Iranian national security apparatus would be extremely valuable in Israeli eyes, and Israeli deliberations about the handling of that source’s information presumably would be biased in favor long-term protection of the source.” The Israeli story of how its spies located the documents “does seem fishy,” Pillar said, especially considering Israel’s obvious effort to derive maximum “political-diplomatic mileage” out of the “supposed revelation” of such a well-placed source.

Graham Fuller, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia as well as Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, offered a similar assessment of the Israeli claim. “If the Israelis had such a sensitive source in Tehran,” Fuller commented, “they would not want to risk him.” Fuller concluded that the Israelis’ claim that they had accurate knowledge of which safes to crack is “dubious, and the whole thing may be somewhat fabricated.”

No proof of authenticity

Netanyahu’s April 30 slide show presented a series of purported Iranian documents containing sensational revelations that he pointed to as proof of his insistence that Iran had lied about its interest in manufacturing nuclear weapons. The visual aides included a file supposedly dating back to early 2000 or before that detailed various ways to achieve a plan to build five nuclear weapons by mid-2003.

Another document that generated widespread media interest was an alleged report on a discussion among leading Iranian scientists of a purported mid-2003 decision by Iran’s Defense Minister to separate an existing secret nuclear weapons program into overt and covert parts.

Left out of the media coverage of these “nuclear archive” documents was a simple fact that was highly inconvenient to Netanyahu: nothing about them offered a scintilla of evidence that they were genuine. For example, not one contained the official markings of the relevant Iranian agency.

Tariq Rauf, who was head of the Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 2001 to 2011, told The Grayzone that these markings were practically ubiquitous on official Iranian files.

“Iran is a highly bureaucratized system,” Rauf explained. “Hence, one would expect a proper book-keeping system that would record incoming correspondence, with date received, action officer, department, circulation to additional relevant officials, proper letterhead, etc.”

But as Rauf noted, the “nuclear archive” documents that were published by the Washington Post bore no such evidence of Iranian government origin. Nor did they contain other markings to indicate their creation under the auspices of an Iranian government agency.

What those documents do have in common is the mark of a rubber stamp for a filing system showing numbers for a “record”, a “file” and a “ledger binder” — like the black binders that Netanyahu flashed to the cameras during his slideshow. But these could have easily been created by the Mossad and stamped on to the documents along with the appropriate Persian numbers.

Forensic confirmation of the documents’ authenticity would have required access to the original documents. But as Netanyahu noted in his April 30, 2018 slide show, the “original Iranian materials” were kept “in a very safe place” – implying that no one would be allowed to have any such access.

Withholding access to outside experts

In fact, even the most pro-Israeli visitors to Tel Aviv have been denied access to the original documents. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security and Olli Heinonen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – both stalwart defenders of the official Israeli line on Iranian nuclear policy – reported in October 2018 that they had been given only a “slide deck” showing reproductions or excerpts of the documents.

When a team of six specialists from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs visited Israel in January 2019 for briefings on the archive, they too were offered only a cursory browse of the supposedly original documents. Harvard Professor Matthew Bunn recalled in an interview with this writer that the team had been shown one of the binders containing what were said to be original documents relating to Iran’s relations with the IAEA and had “paged through a bit of it.”

But they were shown no documents on Iran nuclear weapons work. As Bunn admitted, “We weren’t attempting to do any forensic analysis of these documents.”

Typically, it would be the job of the U.S. government and the IAEA to authenticate the documents. Oddly, the Belfer Center delegation reported that the U.S. government and the IAEA had each received only copies of the entire archive, not the original files. And the Israelis were in no hurry to provide the genuine articles: the IAEA did not receive a complete set of documents until November 2019, according to Bunn.

By then, Netanyahu had not only already accomplished the demolition of the Iran nuclear deal; he and Trump’s ferociously hawkish CIA-director Mike Pompeo had maneuvered the president into a policy of imminent confrontation with Tehran.

The second coming of fake missile drawings

Among the documents Netanyahu flashed on the screen in his April 30, 2018 slide show was a schematic drawing of the missile reentry vehicle of an Iranian Shahab-3 missile, showing what was obviously supposed to represent a nuclear weapon inside.
Mossad And MEK Role in Fabrication of Nuclear Documents against Iran

Technical drawing from page 11 of David Albright, Olli Heinonen, and Andrea Stricker’s “Breaking Up and Reorienting Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” published by the Institute for Science and International Security on October 28, 2018.

This drawing was part of a set of eighteen technical drawings of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle. These were found in a collection of documents secured over the course of several years between the Bush II and Obama administrations by an Iranian spy working for Germany’s BND intelligence service. Or so the Israeli official story went.

In 2013, however, a former senior German Foreign Office official named Karsten Voigt revealed to this writer that the documents had been initially provided to German intelligence by a member of the Mujaheddin E-Khalq (MEK).

The MEK is an exiled Iranian armed opposition organization that had operated under Saddam Hussein’s regime as a proxy against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. It went on to cooperate with the Israeli Mossad beginning in the 1990s, and enjoys a close relationship with Saudi Arabia as well. Today, numerous former US officials are on the MEK’s payroll, acting as de facto lobbyists for regime change in Iran.

Voigt recalled how senior BND officials warned him they did not consider the MEK source or the materials he provided to be credible. They were worried that the Bush administration intended to use the dodgy documents to justify an attack on Iran, just as it exploited the tall tales collected from Iraqi defector codenamed “Curveball” to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

As this writer first reported in 2010, the appearance of the “dunce-cap” shape of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle in the drawings was a tell-tale sign that the documents were fabricated. Whoever drew those schematic images in 2003 was clearly under the false impression that Iran was relying on the Shahab-3 as its main deterrent force. After all, Iran had announced publicly in 2001 that the Shahab-3 was going into “serial production” and in 2003 that it was “operational.”

But those official claims by Iran were a ruse aimed primarily at deceiving Israel, which had threatened air attacks on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. In fact, Iran’s Defense Ministry was aware that the Shahab-3 did not have sufficient range to reach Israel.

According to Michael Elleman, the author of the most definitive account of the Iranian missile program, as early as 2000, Iran’s Defense Ministry had begun developing an improved version of the Shahab-3 with a reentry vehicle boasting a far more aerodynamic “triconic baby bottle” shape – not the “dunce-cap” of the original.

As Elleman told this writer, however, foreign intelligence agencies remained unaware of the new and improved Shahab missile with a very different shape until it took its first flight test in August 2004. Among the agencies kept in the dark about the new design was Israel’s Mossad. That explains why the false documents on redesigning the Shahab-3 – the earliest dates of which were in 2002, according to an unpublished internal IAEA document – showed a reentry vehicle design that Iran had already discarded.

The role of the MEK in passing the massive tranche of supposed secret Iranian nuclear documents to the BND and its hand-in-glove relationship with the Mossad leaves little room for doubt that the documents introduced to Western intelligence 2004 were, in fact, created by the Mossad.

For the Mossad, the MEK was a convenient unit for outsourcing negative press about Iran which it did not want attributed directly to Israeli intelligence. To enhance the MEK’S credibility in the eyes foreign media and intelligence agencies, Mossad passed the coordinates of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility to the MEK in 2002. Later, it provided to the MEK personal information such as the passport number and home telephone number of Iranian physics professor Mohsen Fakhrizadh, whose name appeared in the nuclear documents, according to the co-authors of a best-selling Israeli book on the Mossad’s covert operations.

By trotting out the same discredited technical drawing depicting the wrong Iranian missile reentry vehicle – a trick he had previously deployed to create the original case for accusing Iran of covert nuclear weapons development – the Israeli prime minister showed how confident he was in his ability to hoodwink Washington and the Western corporate media.

Netanyahu’s multiple levels of deception have been remarkably successful, despite having relied on crude stunts that any diligent news organization should have seen through. Through his manipulation of foreign governments and media, he has been able to maneuver Donald Trump and the United States into a dangerous process of confrontation that has brought the US to the precipice of military conflict with Iran.

By Gareth Porter, Iranian.com

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MEK terrorists in Albania
Albania

Terrorists do not need visas; they are already welcomed in Albania

A petition was launched by Nejat Society of Iran on behalf of the suffering families of Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK, Rajavi cult) members urging the Albanian government to allow these families to contact their loved ones trapped in the MEK camp. Link below:

http://chng.it/GCPbBfFPGr

This petition concludes:

“We urge the Albanian government and the ministry of foreign affairs to issue visas to the suffering families on humanitarian grounds to allow them to travel to Albania and help them visit their loved ones in the MEK camp.”

nejat families petition

Signatures on the petition have well exceeded 1500 after just 9 days and are rapidly increasing. The daily list of signatories and their locations is forwarded to the Albanian authorities.

This has, of course, alarmed the MEK since like all other destructive mind control cults, the leaders are scared to death of the families of the cult’s members. They know that familial emotions will counter their brainwashing practices on the members.

A few days after the campaign was launched, the MEK fearfully reacted on April 23, 2020 in its website ‘Iran Probe’ with a lengthy article titled: “Iranian regime is campaigning for Albanian entry visas for its terrorists”.

The article is a stream of fabricated lies trying to persuade the Albanians not to issue visas for the families.

This shows how much the presence of the families is a nightmare for Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, the cult leaders.

MEK terrorist cult was expelled from Iraq and admitted into their country by the Albanian government in 2016 and located in a remote, isolated camp. Security experts have always considered this a security threat for Albania as well as for Europe. The MEK presence has also been regarded a negative point for Albania as it tries to become a member of the EU.

The MEK camp, which holds the terrorists imported from Iraq, is entirely and secretly run by the cult’s leaders. Albanian officials have no jurisdiction over it. The inhabitants have no access to, or contact with, the outside world, particularly with their friends and families.

MEK terrorists in Albania

The truth is that the genuine terrorists are already welcomed and living in Albania and they do not need visas.

Those who are denied entry and deprived of contacting their loved ones are old mothers and fathers who have not seen or had any contact with their children for decades.
The Albanian government should pay attention to the just request of the families and enable them to contact their loved ones.

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