Free Republic

The Iranian regime will hold its so-called parliamentary elections next Friday amidst mounting crises. The "elections" this year unfold in a radically different setting, with growing popular discontent and uprisings exacerbating an already dire situation for the regime. Braving systematic suppression and human rights, people in Iran usually vote on the streets. In their massive protests in November, they voted to change the regime in its entirety. Elections in one of the most repressive states in the world are nothing but a farce. The regime has effectively monopolized power through the concept of velayat-e faqih (absolute clerical rule). The supreme...

The Iranian regime has become more brazen in its foreign policy. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) recently attacked commercial vessels in the Gulf, and seized others, including a British tanker. It also launched missiles against Saudi oil infrastructure in September. This is in addition to its aggressive policies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.The regime's recent actions cannot simply be interpreted as a response to rising levels of pressure from the US. Its abuses both at home and abroad have been getting worse for quite some time. And they have done so not because of newfound foreign pressure but because...

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...

IRAN is facing an "international conspiracy" to over throw the Khomeinist re gime with a "velvet revolution," the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) claimed yesterday. The latest mascot of the plotters is supposed to be Roxana Saberi, a former Miss North Dakota now charged with espionage in Tehran. A US citizen with an Iranian father and a Japanese mother, the 31-year-old Roxana has worked in Iran on and off for years as a freelance reporter. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for Saberi's immediate release and safe return to the US. IRNA claims that the plot was first...

A FEW weeks ago I received an e-mail from an acquaintance with the subject line: Have you seen the video everyone is talking about? I clicked play, and there was Howard Dean, on March 19 in Berlin, at his most impassioned, extolling the virtues of a woman named Maryam Rajavi and insisting that America should recognize her as the president of Iran. Ms. Rajavi and her husband, Massoud, are the leaders of a militant Iranian opposition group called the Mujahedeen Khalq, or Warriors of God. The group’s forces have been based for the last 25 years in Iraq, where I...

In recent reports, the Washington Times has misinformed the public about the Iranian group MEK. Here are the facts. The Times foreign service reports that a group of prominent U.S. Republicans associated with homeland security just spoke to a forum of cheering Iranian exiles in Paris. The exiles demanded that the Obama administration remove the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK) Iranian opposition group from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations, and that the U.S. incorporate it into efforts to overturn the mullah-led government in Tehran. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, former White House...

PARIS (AFP) - Iran's exiled opposition movement said Thursday it had learned of two previously unknown sites in and near Tehran that are being used to build nuclear warheads. "Resistance sources have managed to uncover two centres that work directly on nuclear armaments and which were until now kept secret," Mehdi Abrihamtchi of the People's Mujahedeen told reporters in Paris, where his group is based. "They are places for research and production of detonation systems which is a major part of the mullah's atomic bomb project," he said, adding that his organisation had passed on the information to the UN...

Iraq's government acknowledged on Thursday that seven Iranian exiles were killed when Iraqi forces took control of their camp this week north of Baghdad. Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh earlier denied anyone died in the clashes between Iraqi forces and protesters who tried to block their entry into Camp Ashraf, home to the People's Mujahideen Organization of Iran Iraq, Iran and the United States call the dissident group a terrorist organization. Iraq's Shi'ite Arab-led government wants to close the camp and send residents back to Iran or to a third country. Dabbagh, on Thursday, said seven people had died but disputed...

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...

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...

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...

The head of an exiled Iranian opposition group accused Western nations on Wednesday of appeasing Tehran with incentives to halt uranium enrichment that she compared to moves to placate Hitler before World War Two. Maryam Rajavi, leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said she had clear indications that Tehran would not give up its enrichment activities and that diplomatic efforts by the European Union and the United States to avert a crisis were only rewarding the Tehran government's strategies. "The further they move forward, the more concessions the West is making," Rajavi told a news conference...

LE BOURGET, France, July 1 (Reuters) - Thousands rallied in support of an Iranian exile group near Paris on Saturday, calling on Western powers to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb and urging democratic change in Tehran. Maryam Rajavi, leader of the France-based National Council of Resistance of Iran, said the NCRI hoped to oust Iran's clerical rulers and set up a democratic interim government. "The solution to the nuclear crisis and to avert a war is democratic change in Iran," she told a crowd in a hangar used as an exhibition hall north of Paris. Organisers said 30,000...

UPI: There have been many accusations against you and members of your organization that you are a Marxist group, a sect, a secretive society. RAJAVI: This label was being used by the shah to tarnish the popularity of the Mujahedeen among the Iranian people. And Khomeni used it for the exact same purpose. Otherwise how could they justify saying that their Islam is the true Islam. UPI: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made it very clear in Petra, in Jordan, a few days ago that Iran would not be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Assuming Israel is to strike Iran,...

AUVERS-SUR-OISE, France, June 16 (UPI) -- The Paris Courts of Appeals revoked all restrictions Friday on members of the Iranian resistance group, Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, who were detained on June 17, 2003. The announcement was made by Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, on the third anniversary of the restrictions. "Today's ruling is one to be jubilant about. Yet, it is also very painful because for three years these unjustified restrictions disrupted our legitimate and legal activities to expose the clerical regime's atrocities," said Rajavi. The leader of the NCRI stated that "the court has concurred that...

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)

'Only a fraction of Teheran's brutality has come to light' By Kim Willsher in Auvers-sur-Oise (Filed: 19/03/2006) She is the female figurehead of what she hopes will become a new Iranian revolution. Now, after almost 25 years in exile, the world is beginning to beat a path to her door. Maryam Rajavi wants those who visit her near Paris to know what sort of regime Iran's mullahs are running. As the leader of the largest exiled Iranian opposition group, she talks angrily of the 15-year-old boy flogged to death for eating during Ramadan, and the girl of 13 buried up...

Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, the Iranian regime has increased its oppressive tactics at home. The government is indeed tightening its fascist fist around the Iranian people, particularly women. It plans to segregate Iran’s pedestrian walkways on a gender basis, according to a deputy in Iran’s Parliament. Early this March, security forces removed several hundred women spectators from an indoor stadium by force as they were watching athletes performing in the 2006 Gymnastics World Cup tournament being held in Tehran, eye-witnesses have reported. A few days earlier, State Security Forces attacked female soccer fans in Tehran after they held a defiant...

Few terrorists groups garner the bipartisan endorsement and support that Iran's Mujahedin al-Khalq Organization [MKO] has. On October 20, 2005, several congressmen and many aides attended a briefing in Congress. Maryam Rajavi, co-leader of the group and self-styled president-elect of Iran, addressed the gathering by video from France.[1] She received a warm reception. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) thanked "Sister Maryam."[2] A bipartisan group of U.S. Congressmen have signed petitions calling for the U.S. Department of State to lift its 1997 classification of the group as a terrorist organization.[3] In an April 8, 2003 interview, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairwoman...

Baghdad, 3 Jan. (AKI) - The leader of the Iranian mujahadeen, Massoud Rajavi, who was thought to have been in hiding since the American occupation of Iraq, is under house arrest there, according to the Paris-based website, roozonline. Massoud Rajavi and another 27 leaders of the Iranian movement, who were confined in the Ashraf base, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, have reportedly been shifted to US military custody in the Mercury Camp. The Iranian mujahadeen is a militant guerrilla movement seeking to overthrow the government of Iran and was based first in France and then in Iraq. The Mujahadeen...