The Intercept published a news article recently about the cult-like Iranian militant group the Mojahedin-e Khalq. The article is based on interviews with high-ranking defectors.<\/p>\n![]()
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Sadeghi had effectively given his life to the MEK, which means \u201cPeople\u2019s Mujahideen of Iran.\u201d A 26-year veteran of the group, he had not left Camp Ashraf for over a decade. During that time, he\u2019d had no contact with his family or news of them. The MEK leadership had forced him and most of the other cadres living at Camp Ashraf to abandon even their closest relationships. Most painful for Sadeghi were thoughts of his son, Paul, his only child, now 16 years old. Sadeghi hadn\u2019t seen or spoken to Paul since he\u2019d arrived in Iraq.
\nAs Sadeghi and his old friend strolled through the compound, two MEK minders followed at a distance. Sadeghi walked a bit faster, signaling to his friend that he needed to talk out of earshot of their escorts. Turning a corner between buildings, he whispered: \u201cHow is Paul?\u201d
\nIn 1996, Sadeghi traveled to Camp Ashraf, the group\u2019s sprawling compound in northeast Iraq, for a mandatory six-month military training. While the MEK did propaganda and intelligence work, the group\u2019s core skills were military. Membership required extensive training, including everything from weapons skills and bomb-making to operating a T-55 tank.
\nWhile he was in Iraq, Sadeghi decided to leave Paul, who was then almost 5 years old and had been born in Canada, with Sadeghi\u2019s parents in Iran. At the time, Paul had never met his grandparents or been to Iran. Sadeghi planned to train for six months, retrieve Paul, and return to the U.S., where he\u2019d spent several years raising money for the MEK\u2019s leadership, which is based in Europe.<\/p>\n
But when his training was over, the group asked Sadeghi to stay for another six months. He had been selected to train for assassination missions inside Iran and would fine-tune the fighting and sabotage skills that his commanders told him would soon help liberate his country. His MEK commander told Sadeghi that Paul would be sent back to Toronto to live with his mother, a Canadian woman whom Sadeghi had divorced not long after their son was born. Sadeghi agreed to stay.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Sadeghi got only rare updates about Paul during the 10 years he spent in Ashraf. Members were forbidden from discussing family or friends who were not MEK members. When he did ask about his son, they always told him that the boy was well, living in Toronto with Sadeghi\u2019s ex-wife and receiving hundreds of dollars in support every month from the group.
\nNow, his old friend from Toronto told Sadeghi something that seemed impossible. His son, the friend said, was not in Canada at all. He had never left Iran and was being raised by Sadeghi\u2019s parents there<\/strong>. Sadeghi\u2019s Canadian ex-wife had filed a report with Canadian authorities, believing that Sadeghi had kidnapped the boy. Paul was declared a missing child by the Royal Mounted Canadian Police.<\/p>\nHis picture had even been printed on milk cartons in Canada in the hope that someone might find him and return him to his mother.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cNo, he\u2019s in Canada,\u201d Sadeghi declared in disbelief. The friend insisted that wasn\u2019t true. Canadian authorities had even interviewed him about Sadeghi and his son, the man said.
\nSadeghi abruptly left his friend and marched to his commander\u2019s office. He told her that he was leaving the organization to retrieve his son. He planned to join the U.S. soldiers at the spartan desert encampment they\u2019d built to house those who managed to escape, Sadeghi said.<\/p>\n
His commander called a group of other MEK members to detain him. Suddenly, about a dozen of Sadeghi\u2019s comrades were grabbing him, trying to push and lift him into the back seat of a nearby Toyota pickup. As he resisted, he felt one of his fingers snap.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The MEK members shoved him into the back of the truck, pinning him to the floor with their bodies. The truck started driving. \u201cYou\u2019re dead,\u201d one of Sadeghi\u2019s captors told him. \u201cWe are going to put you in the ground, and no one will ever know what happened to you.\u201d Forced disappearances and solitary confinement were not uncommon at Camp Ashraf, and Sadeghi was sure he would be executed.
\nHis only chance, he thought, was to try to kick out the window of the truck hoping the commotion would attract attention. He slammed his foot against the glass as the others fought to restrain him. The windows didn\u2019t break, but as the truck slowed to turn onto the camp\u2019s main road, it approached two American soldiers patrolling the road in a Humvee.<\/p>\n
The soldiers stopped the truck and ordered everyone out. The men in the back got off Sadeghi and he raised himself up. \u201cI want to leave the MEK,\u201d he told the Americans in English. \u201cI need your help.\u201d The Americans took Sadeghi past the razor wire and armed Humvees and into their own makeshift military compound next door.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cHe (Reza Sadeghi) had been selected to train for assassination missions inside Iran and would fine-tune the fighting and sabotage skills that his commanders told him would soon help liberate his country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once inside, Sadeghi asked to make a phone call. He still had the phone number of his brother who lived in Canada. He called him and asked for their parents\u2019 number in Iran. After so much time without a word, they didn\u2019t even know whether Sadeghi was alive or dead.
\n\u201cWhen my mother picked up the phone, all I could say was hello. I didn\u2019t know what else to say to her.\u201d he recalled recently. \u201cShe recognized my voice and just started crying.\u201d<\/p>\n
Issa Azadeh, a senior operative who left the group in 2014 after 34 years, told The Intercept about his experience inside the MEK.<\/p>\n![]()
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\u201cI couldn\u2019t feel whether I was alive or dead,\u201d said Azadeh. \u201cI was thinking, \u2018Did I make a mistake?\u2019 But the first time when I got into the internet, I saw the truth. I searched about cults. I realized we were robots.\u201d
\n\u201cI loved the MEK very much. I saw all my dreams in this organization, everything,\u201d Azadeh said when we met in Cologne, Germany, last fall. \u201cBut when I got involved in detail with things that no one else knew, I realized that there was no difference between [Joseph] Stalin and Massoud Rajavi.\u201d
\nFor MEK members, he said, \u201cRajavi was right after God. This is something that they put in our minds. Over the years, minute by minute, month by month, year by year, they put that in our minds. If you doubt Rajavi, it means that you doubt God.\u201d
\n\u201cRajavi told us that you have to divorce your family completely,\u201d Azadeh said. The leader told his acolytes that \u201cfamily are the main poison for you guys\u201d and counseled them that if their siblings or other relatives showed up at Camp Ashraf, the MEK members would be required to kill them. Azadeh was shocked. \u201cAt one time, family for MEK was honor,\u201d he said. \u201cThen Rajavi announced that family is poison or shame.\u201d
\n\u201c[Rajavi] said: \u2018Don\u2019t think about women. That\u2019s not your life,\u2019\u201d Azadeh recalled. \u201cYou have only one aim and one target: to obey everything I say and to overthrow the Iranian government.\u201d<\/p>\n![]()
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Batool Sultani was also an MEK commander and a member of the High Council. Soft-spoken with brown hair and glasses, Sultani easily blended into the crowd when we met in Cologne. The High Council governed the conduct of everyone living at Camp Ashraf. They could order the isolation, ostracization, and imprisonment of members who ran afoul of Rajavi. But when it came to major decisions, the council had \u201cno real power,\u201d Sultani said. \u201cIt was just for show and a means of using the women to keep control over the men who might become Massoud Rajavi\u2019s rivals in the Mojahedin.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaryam Rajavi came to us as female members of the group many times and asked us why we haven\u2019t demanded to see our leader in his bedroom,\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Sultani said. \u201cThere was a strong pressure\u201d on MEK women to initiate sexual relationships with Rajavi, she said, \u201cto show your commitment to the leader and the group.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another female member of the High Council at Camp Ashraf, whom The Intercept agreed to identify only as Sima, said she joined the MEK in the 1980s and left it in 2014. Unlike other former members, Sima asked that her real name not be used because she feared retaliation from current MEK members.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She now lives in hiding in a European country and agreed to meet privately in a place where other local supporters of the group were unlikely to see her.
\n\u201cYou must know the organization and the psychological warfare that they start against you,\u201d she told us in an effort to explain her fear.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey assassinate your personality and you will lose your closest friends; even your family wouldn\u2019t trust you. This is the reason that these people are scared.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAs the years dragged on, she began to clash with other members. In response, they placed her under surveillance and forced her to engage in grueling self-criticism sessions that she described as psychologically tortuous. Around 2000, Sima was nearing a breaking point. She made a plan with another woman to escape from Camp Ashraf. They plotted their exit in meticulous detail, but the other woman turned her in to MEK leaders. As punishment, Sima was subjected to even more intense ostracization and psychological torture.
\nFor most of the next 14 years, Sima was confined to one section of Camp Ashraf, unable to move freely on her own. Like Batool Sultani, Sima described an intense form of psychosexual manipulation by Rajavi that she said became an integral tool for controlling female cadres.<\/strong> Years earlier, in 1995, \u201cRajavi gave every single woman in the organization a pendant and told us that we are all connected to him and to no other man,\u201d Sima said. She was forced to divorce her husband and, like Sultani, eventually became sexually involved with Rajavi.
\nAround 1998, an even more chilling directive came down from Rajavi to the female members of the organization. \u201cI see some obstacles which have prevented us from reaching our goals and achieving victory,\u201d Rajavi told members of the group, Sultani recalled.<\/p>\n\u201cThat obstacle is hope for the future. We want to eliminate any kind of hope for the future from your mind. You are either with us or not!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Sterilization would be a means of focusing the women\u2019s minds. \u201cThey said that this organ of the body, the womb, has made women want to be mothers someday and return to domestic life,\u201d Sultani said. \u201cAnd so, visits with women began, to get them to go in groups of 20 or 30 to have a hysterectomy.\u201d
\nWomen were scheduled for appointments at an MEK hospital in Camp Ashraf. The procedures would be carried out by a female MEK member who had been trained as a doctor, assisted by a local Iraqi physician. At first, Sultani resisted. But finally \u201cthe pressure was so great that it broke my resistance, and I agreed that I, too, should make an appointment,\u201d she said. \u201cIn other words, they gave so many and varied arguments for me to go to the hospital that I had no choice.\u201d
\nSultani said she finally defected from the MEK in 2006, after she was scheduled for the surgery but before it could be carried out.
\n\u201cHow many women have reached the castle?\u201d Rajavi later asked in a meeting Sultani attended, referring to what she called the \u201cwomen who had abandoned the last vestiges of their sexual world and were operated on.\u201d The doctor answered that there had been 50 so far.
\nAfter much urging from MEK leaders, Sima said she finally agreed to have her ovaries surgically removed in 2011. \u201cWhen you are under brainwashing, you would do anything and everything,\u201d she told The Intercept. \u201cYou would do any military operation, you would go and have sexual relations with your leader, you would sell information and intelligence. We were under constant control by the leader.\u201d
\nWhen Sima finally left the group, she said, \u201cI was like a lost person.\u201d The United Nations set up a meeting between her and her brother, whom she hadn\u2019t seen for 30 years. At first, she was reluctant to hug or kiss him, so deeply alienated had she become from her closest kin. He showed her how to shop and use money. \u201cWe\u2019ve never seen anything like this for about 30 years,\u201d Sima said. \u201cI completely forgot about real life outside MEK.\u201d
\nWhen she first spoke out against the group, current members requested a meeting. They offered her several thousand euros not to criticize the group, which Sima says she declined. \u201cI told them, \u2018You cannot return what I lost, my family, my husband. You cannot return that.\u2019\u201d
\n\u201cWe joined the MEK for freedom and democracy and independence,\u201d Sadeghi said. \u201cBut if we knew that Masoud Rajavi was spying on the Iranian government during the [Iran-Iraq] war, I would never accept that. If I knew that [we received] money from Saddam Hussein to give information, I would never accept that.\u201d
\n\u201cI remember we were attending a rally at Camp Ashraf where everyone from the movement was supposed to be gathered together,\u201d he said. \u201cThey had told us that we had hundreds of thousands of members and maybe millions more supporters in Iran. At the rally, there were only a few thousand people at most. I remember at the time a few of us were wondering. If this is really a movement like Rajavi says it is, where is everyone?\u201d<\/p>\n
His reunion with Paul was bittersweet. \u201cMy son was supposed to be away from me for six months. It was 10 years,\u201d he said. \u201cThe first question was, \u2018Dad, where were you? I cannot believe that in the 20th century, you were in some place that you couldn\u2019t be able to send me a postcard or call me for my birthday.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Sadeghi had no answer. He was ashamed. He could not articulate how being a member of the MEK had made him feel bereft of individual agency.
\nIn the meantime, Sadeghi, like the other defectors, has many regrets and struggles in his new life. What\u2019s left of his family is scattered between Iran and the West.
\n\u201cI would never [again] leave Iran, because all these years I left my family and my parents died,\u201d he said. \u201cI miss them very much.\u201d
\nEvery night, he dreams some version of the nightmare he\u2019s lived. \u201cEither I am in prison [in Iran], or I am in Camp Ashraf trying to escape. When I wake up, I\u2019m sweating.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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