Mitra Yusefi , her husband and children

Mitra Yusufi, a long term member of the MEK, and a victim of this policy of enforced divorce, breaks the silence:
“I traveled a long road. I underwent a real brainwashing and I have to be alert all the time. The Iranian people detest Rajavi and I hate him. My story is simple. I was a young newlywed when it all started. My husband was a popular man; since he had played for the Iranian National Football team. This was the team that qualified for the World Championship in 1978 and played in Argentina. We were living in England when the revolution happened.
We returned to Iran before going to the United States. In the Eighties, we had heard bad news about things that happened to our friends. In fact, at the time, we were very cut off from the realities of Iranian society. Rajavi wanted to use my husband’s name. We agreed and we were moved to Greece to organize the movement. When Rajavi, after his divorce from Banisadr’s daughter married his comrade’s wife, Maryam, we were shocked. My husband then took a strong position, saying that you cannot take another’s wife. Two days later, though, they convinced us of the opposite.We were such fools…”.

Nadereh Afshari

Nadere Afshari also lived inside the Mojahedin. She knows the reality:
“Rajavi used the family institution as an instrument at the service of his own power. To keep the men in the organisation, he forced them to marry. To do this, he used women as bait and ‘gave’ them to his most docile servants. Yet, at the slightest sign of disobedience, he took away their wives. Women were, therefore, objects passed from hand to hand.

Thus, a docile woman like Atefeh, who had the rank of Major, was forced to divorce four times, on the personal orders of Rajavi. Her comrade, Mahboubeh Jamshidi, divorced and remarried at least three times.
Rajavi considers the family as an integral cell in his organisation. He, therefore, feels free to intervene in the marital relations of members against their own will. The truth is that he dislikes the family which always posed a problem for his ‘regime’. This was for a very good reason: it is very difficult to keep ‘the light of love for the Leader’ burning bright.
From 1991 on, marriage changed its meaning. It became a barrier which kept the organisation’s members from loving their Leader”.

A third defector states:
“At this time, Rajavi also imposed on the leadership a fixed ceremony at the beginning of meetings: everyone had to place his hands on the table to make sure that no one was wearing a wedding ring, which he called ‘a slave ring’.”

Deconstructing the Family Of course, the MEK defended itself. The impact of these statements on its internal practices on international public opinion created a very negative impression. The National Resistance Council wrote, in its response to the American accusations:
“Further on, they claim that the Mojahedin had forced couples in Iraq to divorce and send their children to Europe and the United States. Here, it must be taken into account that the individuals who wrote this report were repeating, word for word, the allegations used by the Iranian regime and by the survivors of the Shah regime.
The National Liberation Army of Iran is based in the territory of a country where family-Iife in the camps became impossible during the unprecedented bombardments of the Gulf War and thereafter, because of the international embargo.

During the bombings, families, voluntarily and sometimes in writing, asked the organization for assistance in sending their children to Europe and the United States to live with their parents or our supporters. Despite many obstacles and risks, the movement spent millions of dollars to move these children to safe places. The alternative would have been accepting the possibility of numerous victims among them “.

The MEK children

The facts, however, are stubborn and the eyewitness reports are very precise:
‘in the terms of the ‘Second Ideological Revolution’, children had to be separated from their families and sent abroad. Rajavi made sure personally that this order was carried out case by case, finding militants or family members living in Europe or the United States who could take the children in. In the absence of family abroad, the children were sent to orphanages or special schools established by the Mojahedin in Germany and the Netherlands. More than 500 children were sent abroad this way: they were handed over to the organization during a special ceremony in which the parents recited a text affirming: ‘I give my child to Massoud and Maryam’.”

Yet the MEK justified itself by comparison with others:
“Moreover, this policy is not without precedent. During the Second World War, children were separated from their families and sent outside London during the bombings. If this way of doing things is unacceptable, the State Department should have published a declaration criticising Winston Churchill “. (219)
The People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran could have cited two other 20Ih Century precedents, ones more troubling indeed.

During 1936-37, the evacuation of the children of Spanish Republicans fighting Franco’s Nationalists is one. To protect them from the bombings which struck some cities very hard, especially Madrid, young girls and boys were sent by convoy to the Soviet Union. But once the Popular Front Government was swept aside and taken over by the Communists, these kids stayed in the USSR for an orthodox MarxistLeninist education.
The same scenario took place a few years later in Greece, during the civil war that immediately followed World War ii. There again, children kidnapped for the stated motive of putting them out of harm’s way remained in the USSR.

Kidnapping could also take place at home. The Hitler youth stole the minds and loyalties of children, turning them against their teachers and even their parents. The “Racially pure” S.S. breeding facilities were only a continuation of kidnap, but with the result of bringing thousands of parentless children into post-war Germany. Uprooted, far from their country and cut off from their culture, these children became wanderers without identity. They only had that given them by the movement or the organisation which took them in hand and led them where they wanted to for their own purposes.

For more than 20 years we know exactly how the MEK has used these kids: easier to lead, because they are more docile than adults who have developed their critical faculties. This included abandoning them to their fate when times went bad:
“In Evin, the model prison of Iran, built by the ex-Shah, one section is completely devoted to the ‘curables’, who undergo a reeducation programme. There, we find a certain number of inmates who discarded their former masters, like Banisadr’s embody guard. But the overwhelming majority are children. They are the ones the Mojahedin threw into the street fighting, without any military or political training at all. These kids (13-15 year olds) cracked, naturally. They turned against themselves”.

From the book: Autopsy of an Ideological Drift by Antoine Gessler, translated by Thomas R. Forstenszer

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Mohamamd Nazari left for Karachi, Pakistan, where the Mojahedin had offices. From there, he went on to Baghdad a month later. He says:” I had changed a lot. I wasn’t myself anymore. My personality had been stolen from me. I could no longer think for myself. I was completely devoted to the organization and ready for terrorist actions in Iran. “ his first operations were against military targets in Iranian Kurdistan. During the period 1985-1986,the unit he commanded was in combat several times against the Iranian army. He also helped reconnoiter and map Iranian military positions, intelligence which the organization passed on to the Iraqi authorities. The former Mojahed recalls:” dressed in an Iranian Military jacket, I entered the country to scout the situation on the front. Sometimes, I captured Iranian soldiers and handed them over to the Iraqis”. In total his unit fought fifteen engagements against the Iranian Army and carried out dozens of reconnaissance operations in Iran.

In 1992, Mohammad Nazari began to realize the truth about the organization and refused to fight the Iraqi Kurds. He served 45 days in solitary confinement and his break with the organization was now complete. But, fearing for his life, he agreed to a self-criticism and rejoined the ranks. But he had one idea: plan his escape.
A little later, he asked for permission to travel to the United States, in order to visit the brother. His superiors refused to let him go. As a compromise, however they sent him to Germany, now free to travel, Mohammad Nazari went to Italy and asked for political asylum. Eleven months later, he returned to Iran, with the help of country’s embassy in Rome. Now,43, the former Mojahed says: ”I am not proud of my past. I fought for 19 years, but it was for nothing. If I have now agreed to describe my past, it is to unmask the Mojahedin Organization which stole the best years of my life and all dreams of my youth.” He adds:” Rajavi is not a Commander Massoud.

He is a Bin Laden. The afghan leader gave his life for his people. The Iranian,for his part, has not the slightest qualms about sending his men to their deaths. But he, himself, avoids touching a rifle. During all the years during which I worked side by side with him, I never knew where really lived.”

From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier

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“From the time I arrived in Iraq, the atmosphere of suspicion in the camps shocked me. Our leaders asked us for total devotion, heart and soul, to the organization. They remote controlled us, like robots. They told us, “if you have sexual fantasies, even a dream, you must report it in writing in order to exorcise it”. In a speech repeatedly broadcast in video, Maryam Rajavi told the Mojahedin: “80% of your energy should be used in the fight against your sexual instincts”. Many of the organization’s officers, who protested against this sudden authoritarian and sectarian change of course, paid a heavy price for their insubordination. They were humiliated, tortured and imprisoned.one, named Hassan Rashedi who now lives in Iran, went insane, because of this. I knew him in prison, along with Beijan, from Kermanshah. Houshang, from Eilam, Ali Reza, from Tehran and Mahdi Eftekhari, who before his demotion, had been in charge of organizing Rajavi’s travel”.

Ali Qashqaei spent four years in prison, two months in the movement’s jail in the Ashraf Camp and the rest in the foreigner’s wing of an Iraqi penitentiary. He particularly wanted to share this eyewitness account: “in prison, I knew Parviz Ahmadi, a young man from Kermanshah. He had held senior positions in the organization. Because he refused to support Rajavi’s new ideological line, he was brutally tortured and then killed. Twenty of us were witnesses to his execution. He was only 36”.

From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier

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Three years later, propaganda and brainwashing has succeeded in convincing the couple to move to Iraq. The trap slowly closed on them. Massoumeh was forced to give her two children to an Iranian nurse, a member of the movement. In 1998, using a forged passport,she arrived in Iraq, via Belgium and Jordan. Her husband joined her one week later. The young woman states: “I was personally seduced by Maryam Rajavi’s position on women’s liberation and by the idyllic picture they painted of the situation in Iraq. But we were soon confronted by a reality that was far less attractive”.

As soon as they arrived in Ashraf camp, the Haidaris were separated from each other. They agreed, in writing, to end their married life, to break completely with their families and to write a daily report summarizing what they did, heard and saw. They conformed to the group and underwent military training. Massoumeh learned to handle many different weapons, maintain liaison between networks operating on both sides of the border and even to carry out bomb attacks inside Iran.

In 2001, this young “people’s fighter” took part in an operation in Tehran itself. She marched dozens of Kilometers into Iran, with her fellow women commandos, carrying thirty Kilograms of explosives. On the way back, she was arrested near the town of Ourumieh. After intensive interrogation in the police station,she admitted everything she knew about the organization and was sent to prison. One year later, she was freed and returned to live with her parents in Tehran. But her troubles continue: her husband is still in the Ashraf Camp and does not know that she is alive. Her “death” was announced in “al-Qamar al-Monir”: or “shining Moon”,her nom de guerre.she has had no news of her children, Elahe and Roya, aged nufrse with whom they wee placed is to longer in service. The Netherland success. They remain missing. Have they,too, been sent to Iraq?

Describing the situation among the Mojahedin at the time she left Camp Ashraf, Massoumeh says:” the fighters were weary and losing hope. Those who admitted this were harshly disciplined. I did not know that there were special prisons for Mojahedn. I learned that later from former members I met after I returned to Iran. In fact, we were very badly informed about what went on inside Iraq and knew even less about events outside the country. We had no access to newspapers,magazines or books. Our only source of news was the movement’s own television station. There were no holidays. The few times we left the camp, it was only to bring a sick person to a Baghdad hospital and return right away. All emotional ties were forbidden by the organization. For example, we were not allowed to keep photographs of our own children, write letters to them or our parents, or become friends with anyone else. Since sexual relations had been banned, women could not become pregnant or have babies”.

From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier

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Naser Naderi comes from Shah Reza, near Ispahan in southern Iran. He was 21 when he joined the movement in 1979. He participated in many military actions, but only admits one murder, that of Ardeshir Doudanger, a young security guard in 1981. Tearfully, he recalls:” I was unemployed, a social reject. They made me a killer. I am not proud of myself”.

His downfall:” it was 1981.90% or our networks in the city had been dismantled. I was one of the only people still active. The organization’s leaders counted on me a lot and I was very proud of that. In October they gave me a new mission. I was to kill the security guard on duty at the Al-Jihad Company; a firm specialized in road construction. I did it without thinking about its meaning or consequences. I went right to the company’s building and shot the young man. I emptied my revolver, firing at the guards who came to help him, and then ran away. The operation was a success. The BBC broadcast a story about it. After handling over the weapon to the organization’s leaders, I wandered through the fields alone, like a wounded wolf. Crushed by me sense of guilt, I turned myself in to the police three months later. But I did not admit committing the crime, only membership in the Mojahedin.

Arrested in the meantime, my immediate superior, Ismaeil Dadoghr, told the police I was the murder. He was soon to be tried and executed. I had to confess. The Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced me to death. During the second day of hearings, the victim’s mother came up to me and said,” did you kill my son?” I answered,” Yes, but I was not aiming at him”. She took some candy from her handbag and held out her hand:” eat them, my son liked sweets, too”. When she saw my chains, she cried out:” Let him go! He confessed his crime”. She appealed to the court to reduce my sentence. For a five-year jail term, I eventually served only 25 months. When I was free, it became a habit to pay my respects to Ardeshir Doudangher’s grave from time to time. But when I saw his mother arrive, I ran away because I could not look her in the eye”.

When he was freed, a stage director he had met in prison convinced Nacer Naderi to tell his dramatic story in a play. Lasting almost three hours, it was produced in Tehran and Ispahan toward the end of 1983. The play was a success:” the director told me that:” We are all bastards. In each of us, at some time, something stops working”. Nacer Naderi adds,”People liked the play very much. At the end, a women hugged me, looked me in the eye and cried. By allowing me to publicly admit my crime,the play let me cleanse my soul”.

Now 44, Nacer Naderi married the widow of his younger brother,who died at the front during Iran-Iraq war. The former Mojahed,who has raised his brother’s two children,says:”No, I am not healed from the pain I feel, the wound is too deep. My crime had no justifiable motive: it was not religious, ideological or even political. One day I may use a gun again, but this time it would be against the organization.

From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier

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“In 1989, I was 27. The war against Iraq had ended, but the situation inside Iran was bad and I was personally very unhappy. Seduced by the organization’s anti-Iranian propaganda, broadcast from Iraq, I joined the organization in order to take part in the struggle for change in Iran.

After intensive military and ideological training, I was made a member, but I quickly began to see things differently. there was a good reason for this: they kept promising us things that never happened. The leaders said: “we’ll win in a week, in a month, in a year’. But nothing happened. After five years of waiting and being obedient, I openly began to express my doubts and worries. This led to insults and threats and moral and psychological torture. I was terrified that they would actually act on the threats they made. Those who disagreed with them disappeared from one day to the next.

They told us they were spies and had been handed over to the Iranian authorities or transferred to other camps, people sometimes spoke about suicides. But officially, deaths were explained as heart attacks or accidents. We had no way of verifying any of these stories, since we were completely cut off from the world. One day in 1999, to punish me, they hand me over to an Iraqi Kurd who arranged illegal border crossings. He took me into Iran via Erbil and Qasr Shirin. For me, prison in Iran was better than living in the Mojahedin camps in Iraq. The camps were places of suspicion, informants and no hope at all.
From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier,2004.

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The new Quincy paper report on the controversies in the Middle East indicates that the instability in the region is not due to a sole ‘malign actor’. The report gives a qualitative and quantitative view of the region’s conflicts over the past 10 years. It shows several states to be interventionist to roughly the same degree.

According to the new research by Matthew Pettiis and Trita Parsi for the Quincy Institute, the reality of the interventionists in the middle east is complicated. Their new report, “No Clean Hands: The Interventions of Middle East Powers, 2010-2020,” looks at the last decade of conflict in the Middle East in which six states have shown themselves the most able to project armed power beyond their borders: Iran, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. “Iran is highly interventionist, but not an outlier,” they assert. “The other major powers in the region are often as interventionist as the Islamic Republic — and at times even more so. Indeed, the UAE and Turkey have surpassed Iran in recent years.”

The report also highlights the U.S. role is as “highly problematic”. “It is an active player in these regional interventions,” it reads. “In fact, five of the six most interventionist powers in the Middle East are armed by the United States — and also enjoy significant political support from Washington.”
The report investigates various aspects of interventions by the powers. They may include low-intensity intervention, proxy or remote warfare, combat troops on the ground and territorial conquest. A table has been planned by the authors to list each interventionist’s activities in certain countries in the region. The MEK has been mentioned in at least two cases.

President Trump and his good friends the Saudis (White House photo)

The MEK, has been used by Saudi Arabia in Iran since 1989 to date. “Multiple defectors from the Mojahedin-e Khalq, an armed Iranian opposition group, have gone on the record claiming that Saudi Arabia materially supports the group,” according to the report. “The MEK’s former head of security said that this relationship dates back to 1989 and included hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.”

The group was also a proxy force for Israel in the terror campaign against the Iranian nuclear scientists. Based on the Quincy report, Israel has been using the MEK operatives since 2007 to date. “Israel has cultivated relations with armed opposition groups in Iran,” Parsi and Pettiis state. “Two Obama administration officials confirmed that Israel had carried out the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists in 2011 through 2012 through Mujahedin-e Khalq operatives, and a former official confirmed their claims in a separate report. The official added that the U.S. military trained the operatives on U.S. soil.”
Matthew Pettiis a researcher at the Quincy Institute and an investigative reporter at Responsible Statecraft. Before joining the Quincy Institute, he worked as a national security reporter for The National Interest and a freelance journalist.

Trita Parsi, Ph.D., is an award-winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is an expert on U.S.–Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He has authored three books on U.S. policy in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iran and Israel. He is the cofounder and former president of the National Iranian American Council.

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Zahra Nurbakhsh

Zahra was saved at the last moment by the speedy arrival of an emergency rescue crew. Her body, however, is permanently scarred: burns on her head, shoulders, hands and chest. She is 45% handicapped for life. Her younger sister was not so lucky. Her body was unrecognizable, except for an earring.

Leila Norbakhsh

Zahra, who still cannot understand the vindictive violence of the four young women, recalls: “we were ordinary peasants. We supported the revolution, but we were not at all politically active”. arrested soon thereafter, the four assailants confessed their membership in the Mojahedin movement. Tried, three were sentenced to death and executed. The fourth is serving a life sentence.
Zahra feels no lingering anger at the four young women who paid for their crime. She says:”when a young man came to ask my parents for my hand in marriage, they had to tell him about my condition. But he accepted me as I am.”.

But she adds: “I am, nonetheless a little unhappy. I would have liked to have brought my husband a body less marked by suffering”. Speaking from her own perspective, her mother, Malhabas Nourbakhsh, recalls:” My daughter Leila was very beautiful. Just before the tragedy, she was asking me:’ Tell me, Mom, are we going to a wedding? she was burned alive before my eyes”.

From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier,2004.

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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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Hassan is 47. He lives alone in a modest neighborhood in Isfahan, in southern Iran. He gets around by wheelchair since 1980.in that year, a member of the Mojahedin shot him several times in the back. He never recovered.
As he described it:” At the time, I was a simple worker in a mosaic workshop. In the evening, toward eight o clock, I was on my way home. I parked my car and had taken a few steps toward my house when a gunman, hidden in the dark, fired at me from point blank range. I had no time to react. From the first bullet wound, I was on the ground. The gunman, who had two revolvers, riddled my body with twelve shots. He emptied them both in me.”
Hassan was treated for several months in Tehran Hospital. He was lucky: many other people shot by the Mojahedin did not survive. His disability has not kept him from his studies. With his degree in Theology, he teaches at Isfahan’s Teacher Training College.

Hassan remembers:” it was during the first months of the revolution. Everybody was involved. but I was no more active than many others. And I had not joined any political party”. He sill cannot understand why the Mojahedin chose him as a target. His assailant was arrested soon thereafter in Sabzebar, in Khoram province in northeastern Iran. He was tried and executed. Hassan states:” I would have liked so much to hear him explain why he did it”.
Why did the Mojahedin choose violence? Hassan’s philosophical answer: “They could not take power through peaceful and democratic means in a system of universal suffrage. No human being can agree with the violent strategy they adopted”.

From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier

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