Just as the Camp Ashraf is renamed by Iraqi authorities before its complete evacuation and relocation of its residents, there are many suppositions about the future of the camp and how to make use of it. Some authorities in Dyali Province have announced that it will be rebuilt as a big, attractive funfair. Also as reported by Al-sumaria TV network, some Iraqi investors have announced their readiness to refurbish it as an attractive tourist spot. The evidences indicate that the authorities in Dyali province have the order to present a plan to best utilize the camp. A
The province authorities have underlined that the camp has the potentiality of becoming an economic center that facilitates and develops trading between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan. However, Abdoljabbar al-abidi, administrator of Azim district, informed of decisions by council of Khalis to return the camp to Azim district. It has to be pointed out that the residents of Azim district call Ashraf ‘the pearl of the desert’ just because it is an oasis in the heart of a scorched desert with its abundant trees and green parks, pools, buildings, mosques, and an airport made for fighters and helicopters.
In fact, when Saddam in 1986 granted the camp to Rajavi, it was nothing more than a piece of wasteland as it is geographically the case with other parts of the region. But Saddam’s granted huge sums of money cut from the pocket of the oppressed people, and Rajavi’s physical and psychological exploitation of his cult’s victims, turned the scorched piece of land into an oasis that none of the people around it had the right to enter or use. Nobody knows the many secrets behind this the so called ‘the pearl of the desert’; nobody knows the whereabouts of those who entered the mysterious shell and never came out; it is full of souls who are claimed to have died of suicides, heart or brain stroke, cancers and self immolation for the defense of Ashraf. Under any brick and pillar you can encounter a part of a man’s lost life, will and wishes. And nobody forgets the confirmed reports reflected in the Iraqi media in early August about a found mass grave containing victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime during the war against Kuwait in 1991 in Camp Ashraf.
Once Dr. Ali Shariati, the late Iranian thinker, in one of his books entitled “Ye Brother, That’s The Way it Was” written soon after his return from Egypt, related the sad history of how the Great Pyramids had been built. That is to say, what is today considered a wonder is the outcome of many victimized people who had been brutally exploited by the pharaohs to build the wonders. Neither Rajavi is to be compared with the Pharaohs nor the Pyramids with the Ashraf nor the latter’s victims with the former’s. But, it is rather a shame to witness such things happening just in the modern third millennium. And the history just repeats in the heart of Iraqi deserts where ‘the pearl of the desert’ emerges out of some land hardly you can encounter green life. It has been repeatedly stated that Rajavi is the one who has openly raised the slavery flag over his bastion with no clear objection to it. His victims are the laborers who are enslaved physically and psychologically; they have to work for him and worship him as well. Above that, they are under a spell to set themselves on fire for him; he has enslaved their body and soul. That is the freedom he has promised them to achieve.
However, although a beautiful oasis built on the cost of the desolate and the deprived as well as the irrecoverable lives and betrayed expectations under the egocentric tyranny of Rajavi, Ashraf can be transformed into anything that can help to alleviate the poverty and sufferings of the people in the region to whom it belongs. It can even be a shelter for thousands of homeless Iraqis or a place for the children to forget the pains of the terrorist attacks that have left them unprotected.