Canadian government officials visited a former Iranian guerrilla base north of Baghdad last month and met with dozens of detained members of a militant group who say they come from Canada….Thirty-seven of the MEK members told the officials they were Canadian citizens or landed immigrants, the Department of Foreign Affairs said. In all, 81 are claiming links to Canada, a lawyer said.
Pentagon adviser Richard N. Perle, a strong advocate of war against Iraq, spoke last weekend at a charity event that U.S. officials say may have had ties to an alleged terrorist group seeking to topple the Iranian government and backed by SaddamHussein….Perle, in an interview, said he was unaware of any involvement by the terrorist group, known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), and believed he was assisting the victims of the Bam earthquake
After bombing MEK bases in the opening days of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the U.S. military worked out a cease-fire agreement that resulted in the group’s surrender of its heavy weapons and the concentration of about 4,000 of their members, some of whom have since repatriated voluntarily to Iran, at their base at Ashraf. …Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Europeans on her trip this past week that Washington does indeed support the efforts of France, Britain, and Germany (EU-3) to reach a diplomatic settlement on the issue. However, she also made it clear that Washington has no interest in joining them at the negotiating table or extending much in the way of carrots.
The case of Ashcroft and the MKO shows just how murky fighting terrorism can sometimes get. State Department officials first designated the MKO a”foreign terrorist organization”in 1997, accusing the Baghdad-based group of a long series of bombings, guerilla cross-border raids and targeted assassinations of Iranian leaders. Officials say the MKO aka PMOI–which originally fought to overthrow the Shah of Iran–was linked to the murder of several U.S. military officers and civilians in Iran in the 1970s.”They have an extremely bloody history,”says one U.S. counterterrorism official
Iranian exiles linked to an opposition group Washington considers terrorist gathered Thursday to demand US President George W. Bush support them…..Rajavi, president of the opposition group, cannot enter the United States because the council and its armed wing, the People’s Mujahedeen(PMOI/MKO/NCR), are considered terrorist organizations by the US government and the European Union. Its detractors call the organization a Marxist cult ..
The announcement of the cease-fire negotiated between the United States and the Iraqi-based Peoples Mujahideen guerillas(PMOI) is a shocking development that is counter to the US strategy in both the Iraq and the war on terror. Moreover, it demonstrates the myopic and contradictory vision that continues to guide US policy in the region.
FBI investigators said they had arrested seven members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a group dedicated to overthrowing the Iranian government. The organization is included on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations. In recent years, its National Liberation Army has taken credit for armed raids on Iran from bases in neighboring Iraq.
At a ceremony last week, an Iranian mother hugged her son, one of 31 returning combatants who had spent time at a military camp in Iraq….More than 250 young Iranians, from a group committed to toppling Iran’s leaders(MKO), are back in Tehran..The journey of one of those sons, Hamid Khalkali, is typical: He went to Turkey five years ago for work, but ended up at a military training camp in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He was recruited by the Mujahideen-e Khalq..
Rajavi fled to Paris in disguise. There, he established the National Council of Resistance in Iran, the political umbrella of the Mujahedeen aka MKO/MEK/PMOI. In 1986, the French began forging ties with Khomeini and kicked out Rajavi and his squads of assassins, who ran into the arms of Saddam Hussein. Hussein had been welcoming the Mujahedeen for several years. (Many Mujahedeen political supporters did stay on in France as political refugees.) Rajavi, in return, betrayed his own countrymen, identifying Iranian military targets for Iraq to bomb, a move most Iranians will never forgive..The coup de grâce that metamorphosed the party into something more like a husband-and-wife-led cult was Massoud’s spectacular theft of his colleague’s wife