These days, admire and hope for the women of Iran is viral but not because of Maryam Rajavi. Given the history of the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), the group is extremely unpopular. It is hated by both pro-Iranian govt people and anti-Iranian govt people. Basically, everyone in Iran hates them.
Maryam Rajavi, and her husband, Massoud Rajavi, are the joint leaders of the MEK also known as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Which all sounds very promising but the true nature of the group and its resume prove the opposite.
In 1979 the MEK supported the Islamic Revolution, only finally falling out with the Islamists a couple of years later. Whereupon they decamped to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and fought alongside the Iraqi Army against Iran during Iran-Iraq War (1980-88).
Thereafter, until Saddam’s defeat in 2003, they conducted a terrorist campaign in Iran. They surrendered to US troops in 2003 who found themselves in the slightly awkward position of fighting a War on Terror while having to protect MEK which was, at the time, proscribed as a terrorist group by the US government and the European Union. The US interned MEK at camp Ashraf, Iraq and disarmed them. The Iraqi newly established government was determined to expel the MEK which considered an accomplice of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The UN eventually arranged for MEK to be relocated in Albania, Europe.
The MEK itself was and remains a weird and cult-like group, best known for a cult of personality around the Rajavis and imposing celibacy on its members, separating children from parents, isolating members from the outside world and many other cultlike attitudes that violate the rights of MEK members.
Maryam Rajavi wears hijab. Compulsory veiling (forced hijab) is one of the many rules of her cult. Removal of veils is forbidden under the rule of Maryam Rajavi although in her so-called ten-point plan for the future of Iran she claims to stand for freedom of clothing. She does not believe in free clothing. A look at the pictures her female followers who are isolated in a camp in Albania verifies that female mujaheds are not allowed to choose for their clothing.
The MEK is Islamist (with a dash of Marxism thrown in for good measure). It is not democratic. By all accounts, it once had a good intelligence network in Iran, but that was when it was based next door in Iraq, which it has not been for nearly two decades now. They might well be by now just another group of exiles, odder than most, with no particularly deep understanding of what is going on in Iran.
Mazda Parsi