(Updated 6:39 AM UTC, January 4, 2024)
Two bombs exploded and killed at least 84 people at a commemoration for a prominent Iranian general slain by the U.S. in a 2020 drone strike, Iranian officials said, as the Middle East remains on edge over Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for what appeared to be the deadliest militant attack to target Iran since its 1979 Islamic Revolution.
(18.11.2021)
An exiled Iranian arms dealer named Manucher Ghorbanifar claimed to have contacts with a moderate faction inside Iran, and further alleged that weapons sales would improve that faction’s standing. Ghorbanifar collaborated with Israel, which proved to be an important intermediary. While Israel was no ally of Iran, it was also no ally of Iraq, and the ongoing war between the two countries kept them both distracted. Israel began selling U.S.-made weapons to Iran in 1981, even after the U.S. State Department began an effort to end arm sales, known as Operation Staunch, in 1983.
(29.07.2019)
For decades, the United States categorized the Mujahedin Khalq, or MEK, as a terrorist organization. In the Trump era, members of the Iranian dissident group, which seeks to topple the government in Iran, have found key allies in Washington.
People close to President Trump, including national security advisor John Bolton, and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, are supporters of the Mujahedin Khalq. For years, Bolton and Giuliani have called for a change of government in Tehran and have described the Mujahedin Khalq as a viable alternative to the government of the Islamic Republic.
(26th September 2022)
– One of the major characteristics of these protests is the direct and indirect role of the Resistance Units affiliated with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) in organizing and, more importantly, working to prolong them.
– Beginning in 2014, MEK organized the Resistance Units, which, while affiliated to the organization, are ordinary citizens with regular ties and communication with others around them, in the workplace, in offices, hospitals, and in society in general. The objective conditions in society, i.e., the unresolved and profound social and political grievances, facilitated the formation of the Resistance Units.
A senior member of Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards‘ Quds Force was assassinated on Sunday by two motorcyclists in Tehran, the state-owned Tasnim news agency said.
Tasnim identified the man as Col. Hassan Sayyad Khodaei and said that he was assassinated while sitting in his car in front of his house. Two assailants shot the victim five times, state media said.
(18.11.2021)
An exiled Iranian arms dealer named Manucher Ghorbanifar claimed to have contacts with a moderate faction inside Iran, and further alleged that weapons sales would improve that faction’s standing. Ghorbanifar collaborated with Israel, which proved to be an important intermediary. While Israel was no ally of Iran, it was also no ally of Iraq, and the ongoing war between the two countries kept them both distracted. Israel began selling U.S.-made weapons to Iran in 1981, even after the U.S. State Department began an effort to end arm sales, known as Operation Staunch, in 1983.
The CIA never revealed who spirited the documents out of Iran or how. However, former senior German Foreign Office official Karsten Voigt explained to this reporter in 2013 that the German intelligence agency, the BND, had been furnished with the collection by an occasional source whom the intel chiefs considered less than credible.
And who was this source? According to Voigt, he belonged to the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), the exile Iranian cult which had fought for Saddam’s Iraqi forces against Iran during the eight-year war and by the early 1990s was passing information and propaganda that Mossad did not want to have attributed to itself.
Revelations by a former police spy upend the official story blaming Iran for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, and suggest a cover-up by dirty war elements may have let the real culprits off the hook.
By Gareth Porter
He emphasized that people in Iran enjoy the right to protest, referring to remarks by President Hassan Rouhani’s chief of staff in which he stressed that all officials should be listening to the protesters’ views.
“Whenever there is some legitimate and legal protests, the United States, the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) as well as people outside the country, the opposition, the son of the past shah step forward in order to hijack the protests, in order to stage violent actions and sabotage,” he said.
(29.07.2019)
People close to President Trump, including national security advisor John Bolton, and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, are supporters of the Mujahedin Khalq. For years, Bolton and Giuliani have called for a change of government in Tehran and have described the Mujahedin Khalq as a viable alternative to the government of the Islamic Republic.
(22.06.2019)
Make no mistake: This is John Bolton’s war. It’s a war that the current National Security Advisor has been advocating since 2007. He has spoken of bombing Iran on TV, in print, as a government official, and as a private citizen. He has received payment from an Iranian dissident group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MeK), listing a $40,000 speaking fee for “European Iranian Events” in July 2017 on a government financial disclosure form (experts say the total number over a series of years could be significantly higher). He spoke at MeK’s conference in July 2017, promising regime change in Tehran.
(30.06.2018)
Giuliani spoke to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella coalition largely controlled by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK), which was once listed as a terrorist organisation in the US and Europe and is still widely viewed as a Marxist-Islamist cult built around the personality of its leader, Maryam Rajavi.
“We are now realistically being able to see an end to the regime in Iran,” Giuliani told a crowd of about 4,000, many of them refugees and young eastern Europeans who had been bussed in to attend the rally in return for a weekend trip to Paris.
(07.05.2018)
Mr. Bolton is a longtime Iran hawk who has supported the Mujahedeen Khalq, known as M.E.K. It is a fringe dissident group that calls for regime change in Iran. Mr. Bolton has said he has backed the controversial group for over a decade.
(27.07.2018)
Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, and John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Advisor, met with the group five separate times since Trump’s inauguration, according to Justice Department documents reviewed by TYT. The documents were submitted to the Justice Department by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)—MEK’s political wing—under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, between July 20, 2017 and June 27, 2018.
That group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK for short, was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department until 2012, at which point it was removed from the State Department’s terror list after an intense lobbying effort. The group was on the terror list for good reason: MEK has killed several American servicemembers and contractors; attempted to assassinate a top U.S. general; and attempted to kidnap the U.S. Ambassador to Iran, Douglas MacArthur II.
(23.9.2018)
(23.9.2018) “It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen,” Giuliani told a crowd at a hotel in Times Square.
Giuliani’s comments were in contrast with the Trump administration’s policy of not seeking a change of government even though it is reimposing sanctions that are crippling Iran’s economy.
(2.7.2018) Cult-like MeK was listed as terrorist group in US until 2012 – but its opposition to Tehran has attracted backing of John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani and others bent on regime change in Iran
That group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK for short, was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department until 2012, at which point it was removed from the State Department’s terror list after an intense lobbying effort. The group was on the terror list for good reason: MEK has killed several American servicemembers and contractors; attempted to assassinate a top U.S. general; and attempted to kidnap the U.S. Ambassador to Iran, Douglas MacArthur II.
In 1992, the MEK conducted a terror attack on the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York, making it one of the few terror groups to have operated on U.S. soil, according to Daniel Benjamin, the former coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department.
The group has been widely characterized as a cult.
(2.7.2018) Many Trump stalwarts have a peculiar, paid position as lobbyists for the People’s Jihadi Organization (Mojahedin-e Khalq), the Iranian expatriate group aiming to overthrow the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Hence we find Rudy Giuliani addressing their annual convention and pledging regime change in Iran.
Giuliani only has experience of two kinds of regime change. Disastrous and more catastrophic.
(22.3.2012) The Mujahedin-e-Khalq–sometimes referred to as the MEK, the MKO, the PMOI, the NCRI or, perhaps more fittingly, “The Cult of Rajavi”–is a strange terrorist group by anyone’s reckoning.
In Wirklichkeit wäre ein Bombenanschlag gegen die NCRI-Großkundgebung zu diesem Zeitpunkt für die iranische Führung äußerst ungelegen gekommen. Andererseits wirkt es auch nicht glaubwürdig, wenn Teheran genau zu wissen vorgibt, dass die zwei in Brüssel Festgenommenen »bekannte Mitglieder dieser Terrororganisation« – gemeint sind die »Volksmudschaheddin« – seien. So formulierte es der Sprecher des iranischen Außenministerium, Bahram Kassemi, in einer am Dienstag veröffentlichten Stellungnahme.