Esmat Vatanparast called mother Esmat, defected the Mujahedin Khalq after she realized that the group agents tortured her small daughter. Mother Esmat was an active member of the MEK. She lost several members of her family for the group’s cause but once she found out that the group’s leaders are dishonest, she defected.
Jennifer, the youngest child of mother Esmat was a teenager when she was separated from her mother, kept in Camp Ashraf, Iraq where she was forced to obey the rules of the cult-like military system of the Mujahedin. “In the MEK’s school, my daughter faced a thousand issues,” Mother Esmat says in an interview with Siamak Naderi.
Esmat Vatanparast
The MEK’s school in Camp Ashraf was a place to train hundreds of children of Mujahed parents under the ideology of Massoud Rajavi before they were separated from their parents and smuggled to Europe. Jennifer and her peers were under the horrendous training of a couple, Soheila and Rashid. “Jennifer still sees nightmares of Soheila and Rashid,” mother Esmat says. “They cut her ponytail with her scarf on it… She was beaten several times just because she had told her commander that she did not want to be a Mujahed.”
“Soheila threw pepper in the face of Jennifer because she was not able to fabricate lies about seeing Imam Ali in his dreams,” mother Esmat testifies about what her daughter endured in the MEK’s religious extremist cult. “If the kids said that they had seen Imam Ali in their dreams, teachers would give them a necklace as a gift!”
Mother Esmat was not informed about what was happening to her child and other children of the MEK until she heard some of them opening up. “When I was in Sweden, I was still active supporting the MEK,” she recalls. “That day, I had invited seven children of MEK parents, friends of my daughter. I went out for shopping and when I got back, I overheard them talking about their horrific memoirs under the rule of the MEK.”
Mother Esmat was shocked to hear those heart-breaking stories of teenagers whose parents had dedicated their whole life to Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. “Oh my God! What beasts we served! I asked myself,” she recounts. “They oppressed our own children this way.”
That teen party made Mother Esmat determined to defect the MEK completely. She stopped serving the group. Today, she blames Massoud and Maryam Rajavi as the main accountable personalities for her family’s misery.