Reports

Mostafa (Milad) Beheshti announced his separation from the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). Mostafa Beheshti born in 1983 was recruited by the MEK agents in Turkey in 2001 when he was only eighteen years old. He was actually supposed to join his brother in Turkey but MEK recruiters smuggled him to Iraq.

Mostafa Beheshti

“In Baghdad, I was taken to the MEK’s base where a woman named Parvin (Zohreh Shafai) talked to me telling me that I would be taken to Camp Ashraf before being sent to Europe,” Mostafa writes in the letter to announce his complete defection from the MEK. He was promised for a good life in Europe the same as many other young members of the group.

Zohreh Shafai the MEK commander promised Mostafa that he would visit his brother Morteza in the MEK. The two brothers visited each other after 20 days. “My brother asked me why I was there,” he writes. “I told him that I was waiting for him to get his documents for taking refuge in Europe. My brother did not say anything. He just looked down and kept silent. He looked so sad.”

In the MEK, Mostafa and Morteza were not allowed to contact their families in Iran. Their family especially their sister Narges used to travel to Iraq picketing in front of the gates of Camp Ashraf and then Camp Liberty calling on their names.

About MEK’s hostility towards families, Mostafa Beheshti writes, “During the years I was in the MEK, in Iraq, my family came behind the fences around Camp Ashraf and Camp Liberty but they were never allowed to meet me and each time I had to take position against my family, sighing the scripts the commanders had prepared for me.”

Narges Beheshti behind the fences of Camp Ashraf

Morteza left the MEK in March 2021 although he had dissociated himself from the regulations ruling the MEK cult, one and a half years earlier. He insisted on his decision to leave the group and finally he succeeded to leave the group’s Camp Ashraf 3, in Albania. “I repeated my demand to leave the group several times, I insisted and endured too many difficulties to stay determined to defect the MEK,” he asserts.

After leaving the MEK headquarter, Mostafa had to get back to them every month in order to receive some money. The MEK commanders wanted him to spy on other defectors of the group in Albania in exchange for the money. “Each time they put a paper in front of me and asked me to sign what they had written,” he writes.

Mostafa is free now. He has joined the independent defectors of the MEK living in Tirana. “Although I suffered a painful life in the MEK for many years, I will build my life with the help and empathy from my family and friends,” he writes. “That nightmare has finished,”

Mostafa’s older brother Morteza Beheshti, was killed in the clashes between Iraqi forces and the MEK’s rank and file, in April 2011. At the time, Massoud Rajavi had ordered the unarmed members of his cult to make a human shield before Iraqi armed forces who wanted to settle a station in Camp Ashraf