Free Republic

The trial in Sweden of Hamid Noury, an agent of the Iranian regime, ended on May 5th. The prosecutor told the court that there was plenty of evidence to show that Hamid Noury committed the crimes he had been charged with and she asked for him to be sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict is expected later. The court case in Stockholm has been a direct embarrassment to Iran’s executioner president, Ebrahim Raisi, dubbed ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ for his hands-on role in the killing of thousands of political prisoners, including teenagers and even pregnant women, during a notorious massacre...

I once asked a senior American official about why he accepted honoraria from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or the MKO, given the group’s cultlike nature and its lack of popularity inside Iran. His response: Even if the group lied about its support, they said the right things about democracy and regime change, and so he saw no harm in collecting the cash. The regime’s fall, he said, would be a moment of truth: Either the MKO would prove itself right, or its political Ponzi scheme would collapse. The problem with engaging in the MKO’s endorsement-for-cash scheme is the impact it has on...

Recently Facebook and Twitter revealed they had removed a network of accounts linked to the Iranian government that attempted to launch online Disinformation campaign. Microsoft said it seized 99 websites used by Iranian hackers to steal sensitive information and launch other cyber attacks. The company said the group, which it has been tracking since 2013, has tried to snoop on activists, journalists, political dissidents, defense industry workers and others in the Middle East, including some who were “protesting oppressive regimes” in the region. Hackers did so by tricking people in those organizations to click on malicious links disguised to resemble...

There could be no greater contrast in leadership on the world stage and in interpreting reality than President Obama’s “lead from behind” model in Iran versus President Trump’s “lead from the front” model. When the Iranian people demonstrated against the nation’s dictatorship in 2009, President Obama was weak and quiet. He was so interested in getting a nuclear arms deal with the dictatorship that he did not want to irritate Iran’s leaders In all fairness, the Obama administration was an accurate reflection of the dominant academic elite theory of the world. In the view of the left, appeasement is always...

One simple word which encapsulates the sum of the aspirations harbored by Iranians throughout the world, both those in exile and those living, and suffering, in the land of their birth. It was one of the demands invoked repeatedly throughout the pro-democracy demonstrations which took place last week at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. These protests were held against the backdrop of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s last speech before the United Nations General Assembly, evoking memories of the election he purloined in order to remain in power.

In a letter to a British parliamentarian last month, a senior State Department official insisted that the United States was “doing its utmost” to ensure that Iraq’s government would treat 3,400 Iranian exiles living at Camp Ashraf in eastern Iraq “humanely.” Two weeks later, a clash between the exiles and Iraqi police left 11 Iranians dead, and 36 were taken into custody by Iraqi forces. Americans troops had guarded the camp since 2003, but recently handed over responsibility to Iraqi forces. Baghdad promised that the exiles would be protected. There is no authoritative version of events, but it does not...

From The Economist print edition Iraqi commanders say they can run the show on their own. Really?<\b> AMERICAN commanders in Baghdad have been here before. In 2004, a year after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, they handed the reins of security to freshly trained forces of a once-again sovereign Iraq and encouraged them to take control of the main towns. But the Iraqis proved unable or unwilling to hold the line against the insurgents. The Americans delayed their exit and set about retraining the Iraqis. This time will it be different? Probably yes. Since they again took control of...

Last week’s bloody melee between Iraqi police officers and the residents of the camp has not only raised fresh doubts in Washington about the worth of these assurances, but has also exposed just how little leverage American officials now have in a country they largely controlled for almost six years. It has also forced the Obama administration to confront some of the thorny issues that bedeviled its predecessor: how to prevent Iraq from falling deeper under Tehran’s influence, and how to fashion a tough Iran policy amid delicate negotiations to dismantle the country’s burgeoning nuclear program. Officials in Washington have...

TEHRAN/BAGHDAD - On Tuesday, Iraqi soldiers and riot police stormed Camp Ashraf, where Mojahedin Khalq Organization members had been based, triggering violent clashes that left at least 260 people injured. Iraqi officials say clashes broke out as they were trying to establish a police post in the camp. “After the failure of negotiations with the Mojahedin (Khalq) to enter peacefully, the Iraqi army entered Camp Ashraf with force and it now controls the interior and all entrances to the camp,” an Iraqi military source said. An Iraqi army spokesman in Diyala said two battalions of 400 soldiers each plus 200...

WASHINGTON -- Now that the festivities are over, it is time for the masters of the media to stop asking inane questions of the new folks in town -- such as, "How do you like your new office?" -- and for the Obama administration to get down to work on a clear and present danger. Notwithstanding the "day one" and "first week" coverage, the most pressing issue confronting the American people isn't closing "Gitmo" or the always ephemeral "Mideast peace process" in the aftermath of Gaza or even "fixing the economy." Item No. 1 ought to be preventing the world's...

A court ruling in the UK has recently ordered the British Home secretary to lay an order before the Parliament to withdraw the groups name from the proscribed organisations list. This followed a fierce legal battle between an opposition force that claims to be the antithesis to the religious regime in Iran and the British secretary of State, who has claimed to have taken the decision to proscribe the movement independent of the Iranian regimes demands. "We expect the EU to immediately remove the PMOI from the list," Rajavi told The Associated Press. "The EU decision was based on U.K.’s...

BRUSSELS - An Iranian opposition group called on Wednesday for the U.N. nuclear watchdog to immediately inspect facilities in Iran which it said were at the core of an accelerated nuclear weapons programme. The National Council of Resistance of Iran dismissed a December U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that Tehran stopped trying to make a nuclear warhead in 2003, shortly after the group first revealed the country's nuclear enrichment activity. It charged that Iran had established a new command and control centre for the programme coded-named Lavizan-2 at Mojdeh on the southeastern outskirts of Tehran last April, near the site of...

Provo, Utah - The head of the Iranian opposition group in exile that supplied early intelligence on Iran's clandestine nuclear program says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has engineered a clever disinformation campaign to convince foreign experts that Iran is eight to 10 years away from developing a nuclear bomb. But in fact, she says, the regime is less than two years away from producing such a weapon, as part of its plan to "create an Iranian empire" in the Middle East. In a wide-ranging weekend telephone conversation from her base of exile in Paris, Maryam Rajavi told me that Mr. Ahmadinejad...

Baghdad - French presidential candidate Segolene Royal received a campaign endorsement from an unexpected quarter on Saturday when an Iraq-based Iranian rebel movement held a rally to support her. The People's Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI), which is listed by the European Union and United States as a terrorist group, claimed that about 4 000 Iranian exiles and Iraqi supporters had gathered in the Iraqi town of Ashraf, northeast of Baghdad. The organisation has a long-standing enmity for the outgoing French President Jacques Chirac and his favoured successor, the Socialist Royal's right-wing opponent Nicholas Sarkozy. Photographs released by the group appeared...

A National Post investigation has found the outlawed terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq recruited teenagers in Canada and sent them abroad to overthrow the Iranian government by force. Today, part three of a five-part series about a Canadian family that got deeply involved with the guerrillas -- and now regrets it.- - - At 11 o'clock in the morning on June 19, 2003, Mustafa Mohammady stopped his car on Sussex Drive in Ottawa, opened the driver's door and headed toward the French embassy. He held a gasoline canister in one hand and a lighter in the other. Two days earlier, French...

Three factories in Iran are mass-producing the sophisticated roadside bombs used to kill British soldiers over the border in Iraq, it has been claimed.The lethal bombs are being made by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps at ordnance factory sites in Teheran, according to opponents of the country's theocratic regime. Designed to penetrate heavy armour, the devices being manufactured in Iran involve the use of "explosively formed projectiles" or EFPs, also known as shaped charges, often triggered by infra-red beams.The weapons can pierce the armour of British and American tanks and armoured personnel carriers and completely destroy armoured Land Rovers, which...

A core component of the United States' foreign policy since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US has been educational reform in Muslim countries to check the influence of extremist ideologies and fundamentalism. International obligations under the United Nations Security Council's anti-extremism resolutions also require curricular reform. Pakistan, as the birthplace of the Taliban and home to many a militant Islamic movement, finds itself at the center of policy debates and projects on curbing extremism and promoting "moderate Islam" through education. A growing pile of policy proposals in the United States, including a recent report from the US Institute...

Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the Iranian Resistance, shows photographs as she attends a meeting of the liberal group at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, eastern France, Monday, April 10, 2006. Rajavi came to Strasbourg to discuss about the increasing crisis between the world and the Iranian regime. (AP Photo/ Christian Hartmann)

LONDON, November 2 (IranMania) - Terrorist Mujahideen Khalq Organization (MKO) was involved in car bombing in the southern port city of Basra on Monday, Iraqi security official told IRNA. The car bombing on Monday killed at least 20 Iraqi civilians and injured more than 50 in Basra. Several of those injured are in critical condition. The security official said that the number of deaths will probably rise. "The car bombing took place in Basra following suspicious contacts between MKO elements and British military officers based in the Iraqi city," he said. Iraqi police arrested two British nationals accused of bombing...

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 20 (Reuters) - The United States can designate foreign organizations as terrorist groups and bar Americans from financially backing them, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday. "Leaving the determination of whether a group is a 'foreign terrorist organization' to the executive branch ... is both a reasonable and a constitutional way to make such determinations," Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote for a three-judge panel. "The Constitution does not forbid Congress from requiring individuals, whether they agree with the executive branch determination or not, to refrain from furnishing material assistance to designated terrorist organizations." The ruling by the...