Mohtaram Babaei is another woman whose fate was tied up with the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO, MEK, PMOI, Cult of Rajavi) at her early age. She eventually became a victim of the cult. While she was only 17, she was seduced by the group’s propaganda. She was led to join the group in Camp Ashraf, Iraq.
Mohtaram was among the young girls chosen by Rajavi to commit suicide in the disastrous cross border operation against Iran “Eternal Light”, but she survived the battle and returned to Camp Ashraf while she was severely wounded in the face.
She had married to one of her comrades before the so-called “ideological revolution”. After the ideological revolution, she raised against Massoud Rajavi’s order and refused to divorce her husband, Karim Haqi. The same issue made her one of the problematic members for the group leaders.
Moreover, she had another crime based on the organizational rulings, and that was having a baby. While she was pregnant, she was jailed for resisting the ideological demands of the organization in the ideological revolution. According to the testimonies of certain defectors of the group, including Mitra Yusefi and Karim Haqi, Mohtaram was under severe psychological pressure in the prison to accept the ideological revolution and divorce her husband.
Meanwhile, her husband, Karim, was also held in jail at Camp Ashraf until the baby was born. The birth of her child in the MEK jail was supposed to bring a new spirit to Mohtaram Babaei’s life, but the leaders of the organization used the child to oppress her parents so that they would embrace the ideological revolution.
Avoiding to feed milk powder to the baby and restricting the baby’s diet went so far that other inmates at the time said the baby had become so thin and slim.
The daughter of Karim and Mohtaram was named “Maral” and was only 27 days old when she was flown to her father’s cell to break the Karim’s resistance, which again was futile.
She spent a year and a half in Rajavi’s prison and raised her child with suffer until her release. Then, she spent some time in MEK’s team houses in Baghdad and later she was sent to Europe. It took her a long time to get rid of the group.
Mohtaram Babaei eventually succeeded to leave the MEK cult-like structure but the traumatic experiences of living in the MEK led her to commit suicide in Netherlands while she was only 28 years old.