A senior Iranian legislator blasted the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO, also known as the MEK, PMOI and NCRI) for its crimes against the Iranian and other regional people, and said the members of the
"Certainly, the grouplet has no place among the regional countries," Vice-Chairman of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mansour Haqiqatpour said in an interview with the parliament’s website on Sunday.
Cautioning that the US and its allies are seeking to find a shelter for the terrorist MKO in the region, he said, "The western states want to accommodate the MKO members in the region in a bid to make an instrumental use of them but the regional states will not allow this to happen."
Haqiqatpour said that Iraq which has sheltered the group since Saddam’s era is now strenuously seeking a way to get rid of it and provide the ground for its transfer to another country.
Earlier media reports had disclosed that the MKO has offered the US to help it spark Syria-like unrests in Iraq.
In an April report, Didehban Center disclosed that the MKO has on many occasions asked the US administration to provide the group with financial support in a bid to make Iraq insecure.
The report said that the proposals have been put forth to the US officials through former and retired Washington officials who are now among the MKO advocates, including former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, Former presidential candidate John Mc Cain and former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
The MKO has claimed that it can recruit extremist and terrorist groups in Iraq due to its three-decade-long stay in that country which has also provided them with some in-debt knowledge of the Arab country, and then organize bombing plots, suicide attacks and spark sectarian and ethnic conflict in a bid to make Iraq’s atmosphere tense similar to the present conditions in Syria.
Despite the efforts made by the Iraqi government to expel all MKO elements from Iraq, the western supporters of MKO, specially the US, have prevented their expulsion from the Muslim country so far.
In September 2012, the last groups of the MKO terrorists left Camp Ashraf, their main training center in Iraq’s Diyala province. They have been transferred to Camp Liberty transient facility near Baghdad.
No world country has yet accepted to host the members of the terrorist group.
The MKO, founded in the 1960s, blended elements of Islamism and Stalinism and participated in the overthrow of the US-backed Shah of Iran in 1979. Ahead of the revolution, the MKO conducted attacks and assassinations against both Iranian and Western targets.
The group started assassination of the citizens and officials after the revolution in a bid to take control of the newly-established Islamic Republic. It killed several of Iran’s new leaders in the early years after the revolution, including the then President, Mohammad Ali Rajayee, Prime Minister, Mohammad Javad Bahonar and the Judiciary Chief, Mohammad Hossein Beheshti who were killed in bomb attacks by MKO members in 1981.
The group fled to Iraq in 1986, where it was protected by Saddam Hussein and where it helped the Iraqi dictator suppress Shiite and Kurd uprisings in the country.
The terrorist group joined Saddam’s army during the Iraqi imposed war on Iran (1980-1988) and helped Saddam and killed thousands of Iranian civilians and soldiers during the US-backed Iraqi imposed war on Iran.
Since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the group, which now adheres to a pro-free-market philosophy, has been strongly backed by neo-conservatives in the United States, who took the MKO off the US terror list in September.