When President Trump warned Iran over Twitter on Sunday night about severe consequences for any threats toward the United States, it did not just come out of the blue. Speaking…
Robert Hunter, a retired ambassador now with the National Defense University, says the residents of Camp Ashraf ought to be protected. But, he adds,”getting into bed with these people, I think, would be a profound mistake.”Hunter describes the MEK aka MKO/PMOI as a Marxist cult, whose members have learned the ways of Western public relations.
… Ali al-Zuhairi, an Iraqi tribal sheik in the town of Khalis, near Camp Ashraf, recalls bitterly how the MEK helped Saddam put down the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings in 1991. Zuhairi claims the MEK killed rebel Iraqis and left their bodies in the street. He calls them”terrorists.”… Refuge in Iraq came at a price, though. Saddam Hussein put them to work against their own country during the Iran-Iraq war. And he had other jobs for them, as well.
It’s a group of Iranians. They want to overthrow Iran’s government and they are in exile right now in Iraq. We’re going to hear this morning from both sides of the border about one of the stranger stories to emerge from the war. The story centers around the Iranian exiles who call themselves the People’s Mujahideen, or MEK. Their U.S.-protected camp is called Camp Ashraf..Last spring after living in Camp Ashraf for half her life, 40-year-old Batul Soltani made a run for it. She fled to the nearby American military compound.
Like Batul Soltani and thousands of others, Arash Sametipour could’ve been trapped in Camp Ashraf all these years. He joined the MEK in the 1990s, and in 2001 he was sent from Iraq into Iran to assassinate an Iranian general. The plot failed, he lost his right hand in a grenade explosion and was imprisoned in Iran.