Posted on 03/01/2005 1:27:16 PM PST by TexKat
TEHERAN - One hundred members of Iran’s exiled armed opposition group, the People’s Mujahedeen, have quit their base in Iraq and returned to the Islamic republic, press reports said Tuesday.
“These people had requested the Red Cross officials to return to Iran after fleeing the camp in Iraq,” the governor of the Iranian border town of Qasr Shirin was quoted as saying.
Press reports said a further 233 members of the group had also asked to return to Iran, with the next group due to enter the country next week.
But the People’s Mujahedeen said “75 percent” of those seeking to go home had never been members of the group and others had been unable to cope with the hardships of life in war-battered Iraq restricted to a camp under US control.
“Tehran is trying to turn these individuals into fresh ammunition for another round of psychological warfare against the Mujahedeen,” the group said in a statement received in Nicosia.
Most of the returnees were “newly arrived individuals who went on with their lives two years ago (at the time of the US-led invasion) because of the war, the bombing and an assortment of restrictions and difficulties,” it said.
Referring to reports in Tehran that they could be used by Washington to spy on Iran’s nuclear programme, the group pointed out that “these individuals have been under the control of the US forces from the very beginning”.
The Mujahedeen, which is fighting to overthrow Iran’s clerical regime, set up base in Iraq in 1986 and carried out regular cross-border raids into Iran. They sided with Iraq during its 1980-1988 war against Iran.
The group is listed as a terrorist organisation by the United States and European Union, but Iran has accused Washington of failing to act against the organisation it refers to as ”hypocrites”.
Nevertheless, the regime in Tehran has said scores of their rank-and-file members have surrendered since the fall of Saddam in a US-led offensive in April 2003, under a form of amnesty that excludes senior members of the group.
Iran offer amnesty? They're going to be massacred.
must have some French in them
These people will be arrested, tortured, and some of them killed. (even if they had defected from MEK a while ago)
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