Born in a Mujahed family, Amir Nematolahi was enthusiastic to fight the Iranian government. When the 21-year-old Amir joined the Mujahedin Khalq Organization in 1994 he was motivated by the young “thin” Massoud Rajavi whom he had seen in the MEK’s early videos and photos of Massoud speaking in the meetings. “A few years later, in more films of Massoud Rajavi which were taken after the death of Musa Khiabani and Ashraf Rabiee, he looked like a king,” Amir Nematollahi says in his recent interview with Siamak Naderi. “Massoud had become a fat man who was living like a king spending the money that was given to him in the name of fighting for the Iranian people.”
Shortly after his arrival in the MEK’s headquarters in Iraq, Amir received trainings for operating explosives and launching bombs. He was then ordered to cross the Iranian border to launch a terrorist attack in Tehran’s Police headquarters. “I was told that the building was only for Police authorities but when I went there, I saw something else,” Amir says. “I saw about a hundred of young innocent soldiers as old as I was.” Amir quit the operation and returned to the MEK’s camp in Iraq. “I told lie to my commanders, I said, ‘the bomb did not explode and I don’t know why’.”
Siamak Naderi and Amir Nematollahi;the MEK ex-operative
This was the jerk of his hesitations about the MEK and its leaders. He found the group’s main leader as a despotic dictator who wanted the absolute obedience of his followers. “Under the name of struggle, there was an oppressive atmosphere in the MEK,” he recalls. “Two people were not allowed to sit next to each other in the eating place, twice in one single day. They were immediately accused of planning conspiracy against the group. They called it Mahfel.”
As the MEK is a “No Exit” establishment, dissident members of the group are never allowed to simply leave it particularly when the group was located in Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein. “Every one who entered the MEK, his passport was confiscated by the group,” he explains how members were locked up in the MEK. “His arrival was not registered by Iraq government so he was considered an illegal person in that country.”
This was the leverage to suppress the person who wanted to leave the MEK. He had to go to the Iraqi’s notorious prison, Abu Quraib for eight years. Before that he had to stay in the MEK’s quarantine –actually jail– for two years. And prior to all these imprisonments he was coerced under long hours of brainwashing meetings in order to get convinced not to leave the group. Amir Nematollahi explains how the meetings went on: “Everyone who wanted to leave was supposed to attend a meeting where he was put under harsh peer pressure. Commanders and even peers humiliated him insulting, spitting on him and even beating him.”
However, the public meeting was not the end of this violent procedure. “If he was not convinced to stay in the group, he was taken to a smaller meeting where a dozen of commanders tortured him,” Amir states. “These actions were taken systematically under the direct order of Massoud Rajavi.”
Amir states the names several MEK members who got victims of the totalitarian structure of the Cult of Rajavi. Ali Tabrizi is one of the members he recounts his heartbreaking fate in the MEK camp:
“Ali was a young boy from Tabriz. He had been a sympathizer of the group and he had legally traveled to Turkey and then to Iraq but shortly after he arrived in the group, he declared that he did not want to stay there. The group leaders seized his legal passport and handed him over to Iraqi intelligence. He was eventually jailed in Abu Quraib where terrible living conditions caused him to get infected by tuberculosis. He was almost dying when an Iraqi doctor helped him to get treatments in a hospital. Having become so desperate, Ali wrote a letter to the MEK and asked them to let him get back to the camp. However, when he returned, again he asked for his passport. He told the group leaders ‘it is your duty to send me back to Turkey’. Later, he was disappeared. He was my friend but I did not see him in the meetings anymore.”
Amir recalls Maryam Rajavi’s words saying “Massoud has come to save the world”! The former bomb maker of the MEK terror teams says, “The Rajavis do not provide the expenses of dental treatment for a young member of their cult but they run their kingdom with the funds they were offered by Saddam Hussein and Saudi Arabia.”
Amir Nematolahi speaks out about the human rights violations committed by the MEK leaders twenty years after his defection from the MEK. “I kept silent for over twenty years,” he argues. “Today, I am speaking because I want my testimonies to be recorded in the history. The MEK leaders must be tried in a fair trial for what they did.”