Although Washington officially denies involvement in such activity, Teheran has long said to detect the hand of both and in attacks by guerrilla groups on its internal security forces. Last Monday, publicly hanged a man, Nasrollah Shanbe Zehi, for his involvement in a bomb attack that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards in the city of Zahedan in Sistan-Baluchistan.
That we occasionally hear the name of terrorist MKO and Pentagon’s use of this organization doesn’t mean that they only rely on this terrorist group to destabilize the country. In fact, it means that Pentagon and Neocons, as pioneers of warmongering against Iran, use all possible means, including the gang of Rigi, Pezhak and criminal cult of Rajavi.
The big problem with this approach, however, is that it fails to understand the dynamics of our continued presence in Iraq. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee given on Feb. 1, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, made a statement that should have set off alarm bells and sent everyone rushing for the lifeboats:
One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being”run”in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.
One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being “run” in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.
It appears not to have occurred to Boot, or to the Mujahedin Khalq’s other conservative supporters, to find out what Iran’s human rights activists and democratic dissidents think of this “cult.” Not surprisingly, the MEK is held in near-universal disdain by those dissidents, precisely because it is a cult, a terrorist body and Stalinist in ideology—that is, undemocratic to the core. Either this contradiction hasn’t occurred to Boot or, worse, it simply doesn’t matter to him.
Pointing to Bush’s order to US forces in Iraq to shoot Iranian and Syrian agents in Iraq, Pentagon’s emphasis that Iranian agents were behind the deaths of 5 US forces in Karbala and the departure of second US aircraft carrier to the region, Spiegel writes that despite all these, the White House denies any effort to overthrow the rule of Mullahs.
Camp Ashraf which is occupied by the Iraq-based Iranian opposition group the Mujahedine Khalq Organization (MKO) is sited more than 260km north of Baghdad. This group resettled in Iraq in 1987 during the rule of Saddam Hussain. After Saddam was ousted in 2003, the US army gave protection to this camp which remains today.
The announcement came on the heels of his pledge in the State of the Union address to bring another aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, a move that clearly targeted Iran. A prominent Iranian parliamentarian responded to Bush’s threat by saying,”Such an order is a clear terrorist act and against all internationally acknowledged norms.”Iraq’s deputy prime minister, meanwhile, put a pox on both Iran and the U.S. for conducting their geopolitical battle on Iraqi soil.
Leaders of Camp Ashraf move with heavy US forces’ protection inside Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. During visits of Iraqi officials to Tehran and their Iranian counterparts to Baghdad, the MKO group file was at the top of bilateral talks. It was said that Iran wants a settlement with Iraqis to end the MKO file in return for full security cooperation that guarantees stopping the infiltration of terrorist elements into Iraq from the Iranian borders.