To be honest, Israel’s so-called preemptive strikes on Iran show that Benjamin Netanyahu has gone beyond his government’s “Initiation Doctrine.” According to Netanyahu’s rhetoric to the Iranian nation while dropping bombs on Iranian citizens, he wants to change the Iranian regime and claims to stand with the Iranian nation.
As expected, the leaders of the MEK, as one of the opposition groups, are delighted with these fantasies. The sect’s disappeared leader, Massoud Rajavi, expresses his enthusiasm for Israel’s attacks on his compatriots in a new message every day. But whether the MEK really has a place in this equation is a question that an Indian journalist has addressed in the Eurasia Times.
Prakash Nanda, who seems to have a good understanding of Iranian society and the conditions of the Iranian opposition, first poses the question: “Will the Iranians respond to Netanyahu’s request?” and he himself answers: “Given the history of recent unsuccessful attempts to change the regime in Tehran, it is very difficult to answer this question.”
By enumerating and examining the oppositions existing in these conditions, the author of this article also addresses the situation of the MEK organization and provides a relatively comprehensive analysis of this group:
The People’s Mujahideen, also known as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) or People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), is primarily based in exile. 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 had 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, but he quickly identified the MEK as a serious threat to his plan to turn Iran into an Islamic republic under the control of the clergy.
The well-armed middle-class guerrillas, although popular among religious students and intellectuals, proved to be no match for Khomeini’s organization and ruthlessness.
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.
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.
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 in 2012.
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.
However, in Albania, the MEK is struggling to hold on to its own members, who have begun to defect. No strategic analyst thinks that the MEK has the capacity or support within Iran to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
After examining the Pahlavis and the Green Movement as two other options to replace the Islamic Republic, Prakash Nanda concludes that none of the three groups seem to have the power or support to overthrow the government.
For this to happen, the journalist believes, Israel would have to be in a position to win the war against Iran decisively and without any compromise, something that cannot be assured in the absence of American support and endorsement.
He also acknowledges that the Iranian military is still strong enough to push Israel back, as seen in its missile counterattacks on Israeli cities on June 14 that passed through its powerful Iron Domes. In addition, he believes that there is a possibility that the Israeli attacks will unite all Iranians against this government.
If we assume the above analysis is correct and the latter possibility comes to pass, then the MEK is the only group that will not unite with any other Iranian of any ideology. They remain on the Israeli front.
Mazda Parsi
