U.S. Removes Iran Dissident Group Mujahedeen from Terror List

In a decisive victory for the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq Organization (MKO), the State Department on Friday removed the group from the list of designated terrorist organizations.

The Mujahedeen have been lobbying non-stop to be de-listed and in a public relations campaign unparalleled in the history of the Iranian opposition, they were able to garner support from the A-list of Washington backers for their cause. The supporters included former C.I.A. directors R. James Woolsey and Porter J. Goss, former F.B.I director Louis J. Freeh, former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge, General James Jones, President Obama’s first national security adviser, former governor Ed Rendell, and Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and presidential candidate. Journalists Clarence Page of Chicago Tribune and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame were also among the supporters.

More than 3,000 of MKO members recently relocated from Camp Ashraf, their longtime location in Iraq to Camp Liberty near the Baghdad airport. The move was completed last Sunday.     

The MKO, by far the largest opposition group outside Iran, was listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997. The Mujahedeen were part of an armed urban guerrilla campaign against the Shah in 1970s. Their current leader, Massoud Rajavi, was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. He left the prison during the Islamic Revolution and reorganized his group to become the largest opposition force to the Islamic Republic. MKO was then linked to bombing of a gathering of top IRI leaders in 1981 and they staged militant demonstrations against an increasingly autocratic Khomeini regime. Later that year, Rajavi and Adolhassan Banisadr, the first IRI president, had to escape Iran after the regime accused them of attempts to overthrow the Islamic Republic. 

MKO later received support from Saddam Hussein and organized an armed force near the Iranian border inside Iraq. Towards the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the group defeated border security forces and entered Iran. They occupied the city of Kermanshah and marched toward the central city of Hamedan, but they were eventually routed by the IRGC, with many of their members dead, injured and missing in action. The remnant of the group resettled in Iraq, in what was to become Camp Ashraf. On Sunday, the last contingent of 680 members left Ashraf and was relocated at Baghdad’s Camp Liberty.