Confronting Iran

The reason why the main Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq has survived for so long is precisely because it has support inside Iran.

Consider the evidence:

Number one: In July 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was compelled to “drink the cup of poison” and agree to a cease-fire with Iraq, after having sacrificed the lives of almost 1 million Iranians. Concerned about the vulnerability of his regime to public unrest, the Supreme Leader ordered the cold-blooded murder of 30,000 MEK Iran members who were being held in regime prisons.

Over the course of four months, from June through September 1988, the Iranian state was transformed into a vast killing machine—executing thousands in a single day. In fact, Iran’s current judiciary chief—Ebrahim Raisi—served on the “death commission” that sent many of these prisoners to the death.

So, as recently as twenty years ago, the Iranian regime was sufficiently concerned about the Mujahedin-e Khalq’s power inside Iran to summarily execute 30,000 of its followers.

Number two: Since December 2017, the government of Iran has been facing unprecedented waves of protests throughout the country. Iranians from all classes, social backgrounds, age demographics from every one of the country’s thirty-one provinces have been engaged in demonstrations against clerical rule. Students, merchants, truck drivers, young and old, educated and illiterate have called for an end to the Iranian revolution, which has brought them little beyond isolation, privation and corruption.

Video evidence from inside Iran shows that many of these protestors are Mujahedin-e Khalq supporters. They hang pictures of Maryam Rajavi, the head of the MEK Iran’s parent organization, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) from highway overpasses. They parade with signs condemning the regime and endorsing the MEK in front of mosques and major squares in Tehran, Isfahan, Mashhad, Shiraz and even Qom, the seat of mullahs’ power. These people are putting their lives on the line. They know that if caught, they and their family members will be arrested, tortured and—some at least—probably executed. Yet despite the risk, they persist. These are not the actions of paid shills.

Number three: A group that has no support within Iran would not merit such attention.

Over the past several years, Iran’s state-run media has produced a total of nineteen movies, series, and documentaries—some of them consisting of up to twenty-eight segments of thirty to forty-five minutes each—that demonize the Mujahedin-e Khalq. In 2018 alone, eighteen major books were published by the regime against the MEK Iran. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei excoriated the Mujahedin-e Khalq by name at least four times. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has directly blamed the MEK for organizing public protests. In January 2018, when the protests in Iran were at their height, Rouhani personally phoned French president Emmanuel Macron and asked him to limit the activities of MEK Iran in France. Macron refused.