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Members of the MeK in their metal workshop making aluminium window frames. Before 2003, many of these women ran the tank brigade.(Armando Cuccinello)An Iranian resistance group that has been living in exile in Iraq for decades is no longer a welcome guest in the country and may have no choice but to return to Iran, where some of its members fear they could be tortured and possibly executed as traitors.Some 3,400 members of the militant group the Mujahedin-e-Khalq-the People's Mujahadeen of Iran, or MeK-have lived at Camp Ashraf, a 14-square-mile base north of Baghdad, since Saddam Hussein invited them there in 1986.But the current Iraqi government, which took control of national security on New Year's Day, has made it clear that it wants the MeK out. The government is unmoved by a sustained international campaign by the group that has included demonstrations and sit-ins in Washington and Geneva, Switzerland.The MeK was founded in Iran in the 1960s, when it organized as a group opposed to the rule of the Shah. For more than two decades, it carried out a campaign of bombing and sabotage against the Iranian government, including the killing of U.S. citizens working in Iran in the 1970s, which led it to be designated an international terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.The MeK cooperated briefly with the clerical regime that overthrew the Shah in the Islamic Revolution, but then it turned against the nation's new religious leadership, as well.Despite its history of violence and its official designation as a terrorist group, some U.S. officials have been sympathetic toward the MeK because of the potential that it could be used as a card against Iran. But now that the Iraqi government wants the MeK to leave Iraq, the group's designation as a terrorist organization is preventing other countries from offering its members a new home, and they fear they may have no choice but to return to Iran.
By Anita McNaught
Qassim Khidhir Hamad contributed to this report.
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