These days, the propaganda of the Mujahedin Khalq makes efforts to exploit the incidents in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish 22-year-old girl. Although the heartbreaking death of Mahsa sparked wave of protests in Iran, the MEK is absolutely incompetent to take any position in support of Mahsa or Iranian women in general. The group has a long record of women rights abuses and killing Kurds.
When the group was located in Camp Ashraf –the group’s base in Iraq donated by Saddam Hussein– the MEK continued to launch its terror acts staging cross-border attacks against Iran. As Saddam’s private army, it helped Saddam to crush uprisings against his rule after his defeat by the US in the 1990 Gulf war.
In March 1991, Saddam deployed the MEK to help quell the armed Kurdish independence movement in the north. According to the New York Times, Maryam Rajavi told her fighters: “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian revolutionary guards.” The MEK vehemently denies it participated in Saddam’s campaigns to put down the Shia and Kurdish rebellions, but an Iraqi human rights tribunal has indicted MEK leaders for their part in suppressing the uprisings.
The Mujahedin Khalq Organization is notoriously known as the Cult of Rajavi, an apparently feminist cult which is actually a polygamist cult. Near a thousand women who have been members of the group since the 1980s were forced to wear hijab according to the group’s regulations. However, gender discrimination in the MEK is not only restricted to forced headscarves.
Female members of the group are victims of a cult of personality around Massoud Rajavi who forced them to divorce their spouses in 1989 and a year later ordered to separate their children from them. The children of Mujahed parents were smuggled to Europe under the order of Massoud Rajavi. Mothers were indoctrinated under the cult of Massoud. They were elevated in the hierarchy of the cult until they were coerced to marry Massoud Rajavi, under the rule of his third wife, Maryam Rajavi.
A number of children were smuggled back to Iraq in their teen years. These teenagers included dozens of girls. They were recruited as soldiers of the MEK’s so-called National Liberation Army (NLA). They were ordered to wear military uniforms and headscarves. They were forced to receive military trainings by MEK commanders.
Although several of MEK female members could manage to escape the group and eventually reveal facts on women rights violations in the MEK, there are still hundreds of women in the MEK’s Camp Ashraf 3 in Albania. These women usually show up in the group’s propaganda with red silk headscarves tightly tied under their chins. They do not even have the right to choose a different color for the scarves or they are never allowed to push the scarves just one or two centimeters back on their foreheads.
Thus, Maryam Rajavi is neither a representative of Iranian women, nor she is a sympathizer of Iranian Kurds. She is just a chameleon who chants slogans according to the incidents in Iran in order to please her paid advocates in the West.