Suicidal ideation is associated with depression and other mood disorders. Under the manipulative system of the Cult of Rajavi, most members are at risk of suicidal ideation. They are depressed, suppressed and helpless. They perceive no image of a normal life outside the group. In one sentence: they have lost hope.

Several members of the MEK have so far committed suicide. On the eve of World Suicide Prevention Day Isa Azade, a former member of the group, presents a list of MEK members who committed suicide under the suffocating ruling of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, on his Facebook account. According to Isa, the reason for so many suicidal attempts –of which several succeeded- was that hope and love has been killed by the leaders of the MEK. He recounts the heart-breaking stories of these people:

Parvin: She fell in love, but love was forbidden in the MEK. This was her crime that led her to commit suicide.
Kamal: He was also in love. He did not want to obey the rule of “Forced Divorce” but he had no way out. He killed himself.
Alan: She was teenager, smuggled from Germany to the MEK’s camp in Iraqi deserts. MEK commanders forced her to wear hijab and military uniform. They trained her as child soldier. They told her that she could never get back to Europe. She shot herself in head.

Shamsollah: he was fed up with the mafia system of MEK commanders. He killed himself a few days before the group’s relocation from Iraq to Albania.

Isa Azadeh also writes of Minoo, Masoumeh, Mehri, Zahra, Marjan, Homa, Yasser, Elias, Soheil, Khodam and Saeed. They all committed suicide because they had lost hope under the excruciating pressure of Rajavis’ ruling.

Each year on September 10th, World Suicide Prevention Day (WSPD) is valued by the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) and endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO). WSPD marks global commitment to suicide prevention. It is organized to raise awareness about suicide prevention and mental health. On the occasion of this day, IASP consider the importance of holding on to hope every day.

Nejat Society and its sister organization in Albania, the Association for the Support of Iranians Living in Albania (ASILA) are two entities founded by defectors of the Cult of Rajavi and families of members of the cult who are still taken as hostages inside the group’s Camp Ashraf 3, in Manez, Albania. Nejat and ASILA’s main mission is to keep the light of hope burning. All their activities are directed to create a sense of hope for every member of the Cult of Rajavi. Hope is a key ingredient for life and can be an antidote to suicide and a powerful tool to break the metal and physical bars of the cult.

By Mazda Parsi

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That morning, Mostafa received a call from the group. “They told me that Maryam Rajavi was arrested and members had to commit suicide in front of French embassies to protest her arrest,” Mostafa recalls. It was a serious problem. Mostafa’s two children were in the group and he had to obey what they coerced him to do. Their life was at risk.

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The world was shocked by the scenes of self-immolations of MEK members in western cities. Western journalist had been already present on the scene. They had been informed about the incidents by MEK agents!
Mostafa got ready to set himself o fire in front of French embassy in Ottawa. He poured petrol all over his body but a journalist snatched the lighter from his hand and a police officer stopped him. Other MEK sympathizers on the scene, wearing yellow jackets with the image of Maryam Rajavi on them, were just watching him. Watch the clip here.

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Arash was interviewed by Siamak Naderi an MEK ex-member who makes contents to denounce the group in order to illuminate the Iranian diaspora. During the recent interview, Arash testifies about various cases of human rights violations that the MEK leaders committed against him and other rank and file of the group. He was an eye-witness of the self-immolation of Mohammad Reza Babakhanloo.

Jaber Taee Semiromi and siamak Naderi

Mohammad Reza and Arash both joined the MEK in Iraq in 1997 but not in the same way. Arash was an ardent 19-year-old supporter of the group’s cause and was dedicated to fight the Iranian government while Mohammad Reza was a 16-year-old teenager who had no idea about the Mujahedin and their cause. He was just a poor peasant who was looking for a job to make a living and to treat his sick father.

According to Arash, Mohammad Reza had been recruited by an MEK commander, named Mahmood Zarif. He had promised Mohammad Reza to grant him job and payment in order to provide his parents and in particular his father’s treatment. In contrast, Mohammad Reza was forced to wear military uniform and receive military trainings at Camp Ashraf.

He was kept in the entrance section of the camp and was coerced to attend brainwashing and self-criticism sessions. “I recall that day, he had been beaten by Zabeti and Zarif (his commanders),” Arash says. “I saw him rushing to the commanders’ office with a gallon of oil. He set himself on fire. Nasser Kiomarsian was crying, Hassan Nazari was trying to put out the fire.”

Arash believes that the MEK leaders did not give enough medical care to the burned boy and he simply passed away. “Mahvash Sepehri just announced his death as saying he died and we buried him!”, Arash recalls.

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In the early days of December, 2021, the Albanian news media, Gazeta Impact reported of a suicide attempt by a young man named Shahpour Danafar in the MEK’s camp in Manez, in north of Tirana. The report called the case as “the Danafar family tragedy”. Shahpour whose real name is Nikfarjam is the son of Behrouz Danafar a longtime member of the MEK.

According to Gazeta Impact, “The Danafar family tragedy occurred in late November when the Danafar family decided to leave the Rajavi Cult. The father of the family and his two sons, Navid Danafar and Shahpour Danafar, asked their Rajavi Cult superiors to allow them to leave the Manez camp and live in the city of Tirana like many other former members of the cult. The commanders of the camp on the direct order of Maryam Rajavi, the cult leader, refused to allow the family in question to leave the camp in Manez and settle in Tirana. One of the sons, Shahpour Danafar attempted suicide by cutting the veins of his wrist. Shahpour was hospitalized in QSUT Hospital (University Hospital Center “Mother Teresa”). Albanian state bodies are keeping a dirty silence over this case of attempted suicide.”

Banning member’s departure is the old tactic that the leaders of the Cult of Rajavi have always used to maintain their cult of personality. However, a large number of the group members –about fifty percent of the population– have left it during the two past decades.

Based on the report by RAND institute on the Mujahedin Khalq sponsored by the of the office of the US Secretary of Defense, “Rajavi instituted what he termed an “ideological revolution” in 1985, which, over time, imbued the MEK with 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.”
Thus, Massoud Rajavi created many of risk factors that increase the possibility of suicide for his own members –better said hostages. The case of Shahpour (Nikfarjam) is not the first one in the MEK. Some names are repeatedly referred to when former members want to testify about suicide in the MEK: Yaser Akbarinasab, Alan Mohammadi and Marjan Akbari.

Yaser Akbarinasab was 17 when he was taken from Europe to Iraq to join the MEK’s National Liberation Army (NLA) together with his 14-year-old brother, Musa. Yaser had almost no sympathy for the MEK and so he began to protest against the MEK’s cult-like attitudes. He wanted to leave the group but he was not allowed by the group leaders and so he was put under severe pressure by the commanders. Finally, on a summer day, after lunch time, Yasser’s friends in the cult saw smoke from behind the base number seven, at Camp Ashraf. Commanders did not let his friends see the body of Yasser. Yasser had set himself on fire.

Marjan Akbari (nicknamed Faezeh) was a child soldier too. She had been separated from her Mujahed parents in 1991 and then she had been brought back to join the NLA as a teenager in the late 90s. A few years later, Marjan asked to leave the group but she was not permitted. Just like Yaser, her request was faced with commanders’ anger. In 2004, Marjan stole the cyanide capsule of her commander and swallowing the capsule she committed suicide.

Alan was only 13 years old when she was brought from Germany to Camp Ashraf to receive military trainings as a soldier of the NLA. She requested to return to Europe, but she was faced with what is usual in the MEK. Mental and physical tortures that were imposed on Alan by the MEK authorities finally resulted in her mental breakdown. She was 15 years old when she committed suicide and put an end to her life. She shot herself when she was on her guarding post at Camp Ashraf.

Today, the MEK propaganda boasts with the names and pictures of Yasser, Marjan, Alan and many other of its victims as martyrs of the struggle against the Iranian government. However, the naked truth about what really goes on in the MEK is increasingly being exposed to the world. The more the MEK propaganda tries to silence the defectors, the less it can mange to cover the truth. As Gazeta Impact also puts, concerns over the fate of two thousand hostages in the MEK’s base in Albania should not be neglected by the Albanian authorities and the international human rights bodies.

Mazda Parsi

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“I joined the organization because it was fighting for the freedom of the Iranian people and for women’s liberation,” He answered the author. “That at least is what its leaders said and wrote in the publications I devoured in my revolutionary zeal. It took me quite some time to discover that, in reality, things were very different.”
Siamak speaks of gradual change in the attitudes of Massoud Rajavi as the survived one of the early leaders of MEK. “Bit by bit, Rajavi succeeded in imposing his own leadership, his authoritarian method and his dictatorship,” he says.

When he arrived in the MEK camps in Iraq in the middle of the 1980s, the group commanders started giving him trainings on how to use a variety of weapons. The trainings were necessary for the cross-border attacks against Siamak’s own country. “During the Iran Iraq war, we carried out attacks on targets inside Iranian territory,” he recounts. “Hundreds of Mojahedin were killed or wounded during these operations. Some used them as a chance to run away.”
However, after the war ended, keeping members in the camps became difficult for the leaders of MEK. “Many members of MEK began to get tired of the living conditions in the camps,” Siamak says. “…Most members have only one goal: escape. But those who openly express their desire to go home to Iran, were executed, starved and put in solitary confinement.”

Siamak himself was subject to imprisonment in MEK because he “dared to criticize certain of the organization’s dogmas: the banning of marriage, which contradicts the Islamic beliefs and the link with Iraq”.
“Mojahedin are forced to submit daily written or oral reports in which they confess their doubts or denounce those of their comrades,” Siamak says about the cult-like manipulative techniques of MEK leaders to control members. “Spying on others is a common practice in the group. A feeling of suspicion is everywhere.”

Alan Mohammadi

Based on his testimony, the suppressive atmosphere ruling MEK drove several members to commit suicide. “There have been several cases of suicide including that of an 18-year-old girl”, he asserts. “In 1999, she came to Camp Ashraf to visit her parents. Prevented from going home, she killed herself. Rajavi claimed in a meeting that her death was an accident.”
According to the testimonies of other defectors of MEK, the murdered girl is probably “Alan Mohammadi”.

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Prior to their capture in 2003, all MEK members carried cyanide tablets in leather pouches tied around their necks. MEK assassins were instructed to swallow the cyanide if captured during a mission. Masoud Rajavi reputedly has called all MEK members “living martyrs,”

“As soon as the teams were selected and arranged, the members would be lodged in isolation totally cut off from other members and received no more organizational information. In fact, they had no more contact with others and reached a zero point of no updated information. Second, they would form a new profile just like ordinary people with grown beards. There were other physical, medical and psychological tests as well as recurrently going through the details of their operation and practiced them. And then, they came to the stage of going over the methods of committing suicide; how to break and swallow cyanide capsules, use hand-grenades or guns.”, Batul soltani says on suicide operation of MEK members.
Members of the group who express objections towards the leaders, will be physically and mentally tortured. If their resistance exists, they would be removed and nothing but death awaits them. They would be inevitably forced to commit suicide in some cases. Speaking at a press conference at the Iraqi Defense Ministry in Baghdad, former MKO member Maryam Sanjabi said, “When I was appointed as a senior member of the MKO leadership council, I was told that I could never leave the organization. Otherwise, I had to kill myself by taking a cyanide pill.”

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The MEK leaders also have techniques to dissuade the forces who want to leave. One of the commonly used methods that is now being run in Camp Ashraf 3 is the quarantine. Quarantine is actually for people who have been openly asking for defection, and after hours and days of interrogations and peer pressure have insisted on their demand. The leaders keep the dissident member in the so-called quarantine for a period of time in which the person is allegedly away from the group’s information and after that period of time his or her previous information would be expired.

Nonetheless, the fact is that the quarantine to burn the person’s information about the group, is a dishonest justification; the quarantine is actually a solitary confinement in which the member is kept under mental and physical torture. This is the leader’s last chance to coerce the person in order to maintain him or her in the Cult of Rajavi. All members, even those who work in the lowest levels of the group’s hierarchy, are forced to undergo a quarantine period, according to defectors of the group. Hilariously, even if the member has no reliable information and has been cooking or grooming all the time, he or she must still go through the quarantine before defection.

Pressure to coerce again
The first and most important intention of the group’s leaders to set up the so-called quarantine is to push the person into an environment similar to that of solitary confinement. There is no specific time for the end of the quarantine days. Mental and psychological pressures during the quarantine period, are the factors that often lead to the withdrawal of many troops. A person in a quarantine environment is questioned and interrogated on various occasions under different pretexts.
The member who, due to psychological stress and disappointment in leaving the group normally, admits to be quarantined. The person must undergo more severe obligations in the quarantine than the past, so he or she no longer desires to leave the group. In fact, when the member gets out of the quarantine accepts that his or her survival or death will be at the disposal of the organization! The person signs a commitment letter at the end of the solitary. Signing of such commitments, of course, implies how horrible the quarantine atmosphere is that the person has been convinced to stay!
In such a situation, another secondary consequence of defection is also eliminated; firstly, the person is not any more at the height of dissatisfaction among other members, which makes it harder for others to follow his path; second, he has not been imprisoned to compromise the organization. After the so-called quarantine, if the applicant for defection returns to the cult with the signed documents, others in the group will be shown “the regret of a wrong decision”.

An opportunity to get rid of a disturbing element
The physical elimination option is still on the table, in the MEK. Regarding the revelations defectors have made about the MEK’s notorious violent system, this option is still left with the group leaders dealing with the individual who want to defect. However, this option is not simply practicable like the time the group was located in Iraq. They are not able to kill dissident members because the UNHCR has enrolled almost all members of the group after its relocation in Albania and it will force the group authorities to respond about the fate of the rank and file.
In the quarantine environment, mental and psychological pressures and lack of knowledge about the ending time of the quarantine, sometimes make it difficult for people who are not willing to return to the group themselves. So, they might commit suicide. This option is an ideal ending for the heads of group when it comes to defection requests. Besides, they are free to set scenes for the death of some of the high-risk members of the group in the quarantine.

Control the defection rate
One of the coolest mechanisms of the organization to build quarantine is to control the exit rate. In fact, the MEK, by setting the timetable for departure, are trying to show that there is a high degree of cooperation and understanding with the applicants of defection
In sum, the quarantine is the last station of the MEK members, who are not willing to return in any way and under no pressure. They stay strong. They do not commit suicide or they cannot simply be physically killed by the group commanders. Also, this is the last station for the heads of the MEK and Maryam Rajavi, who are endeavoring to coerce hundreds of dissatisfied and dissident members.

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