In this report , we read that a group that took up arms fifty years ago is now operating alongside supporters of the Pahlavi regime and with the warm support of Israel against Iran; media outlets such as the BBC ignore their history of terrorist activity and present a sanitized image.
The report continues, “For some time now, we have witnessed the cooperation of a part of the Iranian opposition with financial and political support from the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom in activities against the Islamic Republic. This support includes financial, security, and media coverage that attempts to present these groups as legitimate forces or true representatives of the Iranian people.”
The terrorist group, the MKO TERRORIST GROUP, was founded in 1965 by a group of members of the Freedom Movement with the aim of carrying out an armed struggle against the Pahlavi regime. The structure, which initially presented itself as “Islamic-revolutionary,” suffered a severe blow just a few years later; in 1977, most of its founders and key members were arrested and executed by SAVAK. The vacuum created by this blow led the organization to embark on a new path in 1975; a trend that, by changing its official ideology to Marxism, led to internal divisions and bloody purges within the organization, and is considered a turning point in the collapse of the group’s original identity.
With the victory of the 1979 revolution, the terrorist group of the MKO TERRORIST GROUP attempted to infiltrate the new political structure and gain a decisive role; an attempt that failed due to the resistance of the revolutionary forces and the inconclusiveness of political competitions. From 1988, after the removal of Abolhassan Bani-Sadr from the presidency, this terrorist group, along with him, embarked on the path of armed struggle and violent actions. Rajavi and Bani-Sadr fled the country in August of that year, and in 1986, with Massoud Rajavi’s visit to Baghdad, the MKO TERRORIST GROUP’s open cooperation with Saddam Hussein—in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war—was formalized. This cooperation was the culmination of distancing itself from the Iranian people, and finally, with the fall of Saddam in 1983, the centralized structure of this group collapsed and declined.
In the early 1960s, as the MKO TERRORIST GROUP’s operations inside the country failed, this terrorist group carried out a series of actions known as “engineering operations,” operations that, according to the confessions of arrested members, included the kidnapping of revolutionary youth or even ordinary people, severe torture, and in many cases, murder. One of the MKO TERRORIST GROUP members said during his interrogation: “Following the severe beatings in early 2018 and the exposure of team houses, the organization ordered the kidnapping of suspicious individuals and, after torturing them, to obtain information.” According to available information, these operations were directly managed by Massoud Rajavi.
Despite the dark record of this group, which has not stopped violence and armed actions for more than five decades, these days we are witnessing abroad that some opposition and royalist movements—who had executed members of this terrorist group in the past and during the Pahlavi era—have given them a platform alongside separatist groups. Also, signs of support for this group’s approaches are clearly visible in some Persian-language networks opposing the government, such as the BBC.
So much so that the BBC, in one of the rallies of this small group in Berlin—which had a limited number of people present—only covered this gathering with a very selective coverage, ignoring other demonstrations by Iranians abroad in support of Palestine. The network used the cover title “National Council of Resistance of Iran” in its report; a title it has used to cover up the violent and notorious activities of the MKO TERRORIST GROUP.
In a video interview, the former editor of BBC Persian, citing some old accounts and documents, claimed that Israel’s change in strategy towards Iran has a history of nearly four decades. According to him, Meir Dagan, the then head of Mossad, had admitted in an interview in 1984 that Tel Aviv’s previous policies towards Iran were “wrong” and should be replaced with a new approach; an approach that was based on exploiting ethnic divisions and creating low-level tensions in Iran’s border areas. Manzarpour sees this approach as the starting point for the formation of a network of groups opposed to the Islamic Republic that, in his words, play the role of “executive tools” of Israel’s security projects. He described the MKO TERRORIST GROUP as the “pivotal link” of this treacherous network and said that this group has in practice become an “operational tool of Mossad.”
Another example of BBC Persian’s supportive media coverage of the MKO TERRORIST GROUP is related to one of the network’s programs in which the host calls members of the group “social capital” and “children of Iran,” a term that was met with a reaction from the program’s guest, who explicitly rejected this supportive view. In another part of the same program, when the guest asked why Maryam Rajavi did not remove her hijab, the host replied, “It’s her choice.” The repetition of such positions by the host is an example of an attempt to present a more favorable image of this terrorist group.
Other video interviews with defected members of the organization, such as Mojtaba Zargar, show the BBC cutting off critical remarks about the MKO TERRORIST GROUP’s unpopularity in Iran, a situation that stems from the group’s continued terrorist behavior.
While the counter-revolutionary media is trying to present a favorable image of their provocative activities, international sources, including the Israeli network i24, have also acknowledged the cooperation of the MKO TERRORIST GROUP behind the assassination of Iranian scientist, Shahid Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and say:
“Israel can never carry out the assassination of Iranian scientists alone; Israel carries out such actions in Iran with the knowledge of the United States” and the cooperation of the MKO TERRORIST GROUP and “the intelligence services of other countries.”
