This is a continuation of a piece posted last week about the fate of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) in Iraq.
When we left off, the MEK had been granted protected persons status under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which means that they are officially recognized as people of concern by the UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC). However, when US troops withdrew from Iraq in 2009, the responsibility for protecting the unarmed MEK fell to the Iraqi government.
Iran Focus
London, 06 Feb – On Sunday, security forces in Iran besieged the house of one of the most well-known leaders of Shiite Sufism. Noor Ali Tabandeh’s residence was quickly surrounded with his supporters who gathered peacefully to protest the injustice. This, however, led to clashes with the security forces who opposed their presence.
News about the incident spread quickly and before long videos and pictures were circulating on the internet and on social media applications.
Iran Focus
London, 05 Feb – In mid-January, Donald Trump set a final deadline for Congress (and the five other countries who signed the Iran nuclear deal) to come together and fix it. If the deal has not been amended by May, Trump warns that he will pull out of the deal.
In late January, Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times to argue that the deal was necessary to worldwide security and that amendments to the deal, risked jeopardising that security.
To translate from the language of diplomacy, Zarif basically said that if the deal was changed, Iran would withdraw, restart its nuclear programme, and build nuclear weapons to threaten the world with. That’s basically a declaration of war, in a newspaper, that many took as a reason to not renegotiate the deal.
Iran Focus
London, 05 Feb – An asylum seeker who fled Iran, fearing that he would be killed by the theocratic rule for converting to Christianity, has said that if he returned to Iran, he and his family would certainly be murdered.
Daniel ( a pseudonym) explained that he fled to the UK after the Iranian authorities discovered that he had been practising Christianity in secret as part of underground Christian movement known as “house churches”.
He officially converted from Islam, when he was baptised at a Cardiff church two years ago.
Iran Focus
London, 05 Feb – On Tuesday 30th January 2018, just over a month after protests and anti-government demonstrations swept across Iran, a group of Iranian parliamentarians were permitted to visit the notorious Evin Prison in the nation’s capital city. The eleven members of Iranian Parliament were able to spend several hours there.
The news of this visit comes after the death of Khaled Qaisari. Qaisari was tortured to death in Kermanshah Prison in western Iran. This brings the total of deaths because of torture following the recent uprisings to at least twelve.
The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) have resided in two separate camps (Ashraf and Liberty) in Iraq from 1986 to 2016. This article will tell the story from 1986 until 2009.
In 1986, in addition to MEK members and sympathizers from Iran around 1,000 MEK members travelled from France to Iraq to build a new operations base for the Iranian Resistance. They were granted a small patch of barren land in the desert, near to the Iranian border, with only a handful of deserted and partially-constructed buildings that had no running water or electricity. It expanded rapidly as MEK supporters from the West, mainly students and professionals travelled to the remote area with hopes of bringing democracy to Iran.
Iran Focus
London, 04 Feb – Celebrations for the 39th anniversary of the 1979 revolution have begun, less than a month after an uprising began in the holy city of Mashhad and spread across the nation, calling for regime change.
The recent unrest is different in quality to the ones that have gone before. These protesters rejected reform from within — they called for overthrow of the system.
Iran Focus
London, 03 Feb – New York – A former consultant to Iran’s mission to the United Nations was sentenced to three months in prison on Friday for evading taxes by concealing his income and helping family and friends make money transfers that violated U.S. sanctions against Iran, Reuters reported.
Ahmad Sheikhzadeh, an Iran-born U.S. citizen, made the unusual decision to take the witness stand at his sentencing hearing before U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen in Brooklyn. He strongly denied accusations made by prosecutors in a court filing last year that he acted improperly by arranging contacts between a nuclear scientist and Iranian officials while Iran was negotiating a treaty with the U.S. over its nuclear program.
Over the past 50 years, both the Shah’s and the Mullahs’ Regimes have accused the Iranian resistance group, People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) of being Marxist, but is it true?
Simply, no. It was a wrongful label put upon the MEK by those who opposed it to slander them and undermine their support from the devout Iranian people (as public perception in Iran of the word Marxist was atheist, materialistic, and Western) and the West (who saw Marxists as atheist and a threat to democracy during the Cold War).
Iran Focus
London, 02 Feb – A child sexual abuse scandal that was dismissed by the Iranian judiciary because of the defendant’s ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is still being fought by the families of the victims.
The relatives of the victims, who filed a case teacher Saeed Toosi, wrote to 16 members of the Iranian Parliament to ask for help to seek justice after learning that a judge had secretly ruled in favour of Toosi, according to Tehran MP Mahmoud Sadeghi.
Toosi is a close companion of Khamenei’s, his favourite Quran reciter, and even trained Khamenei’s son, the mid-ranking cleric Mojtaba.
