Ali Qashqaei spent five years (1995-1998) in the organization’s camps in Iraq:
“I was in a difficult financial situation. I thought the organization could help me to get out of it. I was also
attracted by the leaders’ message. They claimed they were working to give freedom back to the people and to create democracy and social justice. I left Iran for Istanbul (Turkey) and from there, entered Iraq where movement officials welcomed me. I received military training to use a number of weapons, but I was never involved in operations against the Iranian army. I only took part in reconnaissance missions inside Iran”.
“From the time I arrived in Iraq, the atmosphere of suspicion in the camps shocked me. Our leaders asked us for total devotion, heart and soul, to the organization. They remote controlled us, like robots. They told us, “if you have sexual fantasies, even a dream, you must report it in writing in order to exorcise it”. In a speech repeatedly broadcast in video, Maryam Rajavi told the Mojahedin: “80% of your energy should be used in the fight against your sexual instincts”. Many of the organization’s officers, who protested against this sudden authoritarian and sectarian change of course, paid a heavy price for their insubordination. They were humiliated, tortured and imprisoned.one, named Hassan Rashedi who now lives in Iran, went insane, because of this. I knew him in prison, along with Beijan, from Kermanshah. Houshang, from Eilam, Ali Reza, from Tehran and Mahdi Eftekhari, who before his demotion, had been in charge of organizing Rajavi’s travel”.
Ali Qashqaei spent four years in prison, two months in the movement’s jail in the Ashraf Camp and the rest in the foreigner’s wing of an Iraqi penitentiary. He particularly wanted to share this eyewitness account: “in prison, I knew Parviz Ahmadi, a young man from Kermanshah. He had held senior positions in the organization. Because he refused to support Rajavi’s new ideological line, he was brutally tortured and then killed. Twenty of us were witnesses to his execution. He was only 36”.
From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier