Hamid Orafa and Yaser Akbari Nasab were two of child soldiers of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). Teenagers who were unintentionally involved in the MEK due to the way of thinking of their Mujahed parents. The shared bitter fate of both of these teenagers was self-immolation. Amir Yaghmai, former child soldier of the MEK has recently discussed the cases of Hamid and Yaser who were his friends.
Yaser Akbari Nasab was the son of Morteza Akbari Nasab, one of the high-ranking members of the MEK. He lost his mother in the MEK’s cross-border military operation against Iran, Forough Javidan. Yasser was smuggled to Europe in 1991 along with his brother Musa, his sister Fatemeh and near a thousand of children of the MEK.
A few years later, the 17-year-old Yaser and the 14-year-old Musa were again trafficked to Camp Ashraf in Iraq as child soldiers. Organizational pressures and restrictions, military and ideological training made Yasser complain against the group’s ruling system. Finally, in 2006, he was burned in a fire that it is not known whether he lit it himself or someone lit it for him. Many consider his death a suicide.
Amir Yaghmai published a photo of Yaser and Musa on his account on the X social network and wrote:
“Two brothers, former and close friends of mine who joined Ashraf and the MEK from Germany. Yasser Akbari on the left, poured gasoline on himself and burned himself and died in Ashraf. Then the organization called him a traitor. His brother Musa returned back to Germany after many years and became mentally ill. These were the organization’s own children.”
Yaser & Musa Akbarinasab
Hamid Orafa was also one of the children of the organization. With his disfigured face after self-immolation, he is still a child of the organization and is used in the organization’s propaganda activities. The MEK considers him a “burning torch” that “burned the curtain of the reactionary-colonial conspiracy of June 17th and reduced it to ashes.” He was one of the 23 supporters and members MEK who set themselves on fire in June 2003 in protest against the arrest of Maryam Rajavi by the French police.
Hamid orafa
In an interview attributed to Hamid Orafa published on the website of the MEK in 2013, he admits that in the years after the self-immolation, he has undergone numerous surgeries, and of course and he literally speaks of the depth of the collective and peer pressure in the MEK cult that led him to get brainwashed.
So, It is not surprising that he seems happy and satisfied with 56 surgeries on his face: “Until today, there have been 56 surgeries, which of course I must say here that I don’t think that any human being, even Mujahid, can endure this number of surgeries. But what was it that made this situation bearable for me? The answer is the Mujahedin’s crowd. There is a group of Mujaheds who made this bearable for me and helped me. Brothers and sisters who did everything for me. It was because of this that I was able to perform this number of operations in 10 years.”
In the caption of a photo of Hamid Arafa and two other people who self-immolated during the arrest of Maryam Rajavi, Amir Yaghmai writes:
“Hamid Arafa, the middle one in the photo, his parents defected the MEK and were called traitors by the group, but their son Hamid wanted to go to Iraq after he was manipulated by the MEK. His parents did not agree and said that they will complain to the court. During the arrest of Maryam Rajavi in 2003, the MEK encouraged Hamid to set himself on fire, thus taking revenge on his parents.”
The child soldiers of the MEK have been at risk of suicide both inside the group such as Alan Mohammadi, Yaser Akbari Nasab and Faizeh Akbarian who committed suicide to protest Maryam Rajavi’s despotic ruling, and outside the MEK such as Hamid Orafa and Neda Hassani who were brainwashed to commit suicide to protest against the arrest of their cult leader, Maryam Rajavi.
The child soldiers have always been at risk of being victimized. The Rajavi cult uses all these sufferings to increase the number of its so-called martyrs and fuel its propaganda machine. There are still a large number of child soldiers who are still taken as hostages inside the group’s camp in Manez, Albania. They are mostly in their forties now. The international human rights bodies must take action to give them the opportunity to choose for their life with their own free will.
Mazda Parsi