Iran executes 2 members of Marxist-Islamist group: Who are the MEK, what are their ties with the US?

The defendants were indicted on grounds of “moharebeh”, an Islamic legal term in Iran meaning “waging war against God”, and “membership in a terrorist organisation with the aim of disrupting national security.”

“The terrorists, in coordination with MEK leaders, had set up a team house in Tehran, where they built launchers and hand-held mortars in line with the group’s goals, fired projectiles heedlessly at citizens, homes, service and administrative facilities, educational and charity centres, and also carried out propaganda and information-gathering activities in support of the MEK,” Reuters reported, quoting Mizan.

Eslamloo had been arrested in 2022 following an explosion at the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology claimed by the MEK.

Who are the MEK?

MEK, also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran, are a Marxist-Islamist organisation, founded in the early 1960s by student activists to oppose the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Known for their notoriety and widespread appeal, the group engaged in guerilla warfare and bombing campaigns against the US-backed Shah government through the ’60s and ’70s, seeking to overthrow the monarchy.

It participated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, backing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the attack of the US Embassy in Tehran, where 66 Americans, including diplomats and other civilian personnel, were taken hostage, according to the US Library of Congress.

After the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the group fell out of favour with the Supreme Leader, who saw them as an existential threat owing to an ideological clash. Following a series of brutal crackdowns and mass executions, the group and its founder, Massoud Rajavi, were exiled.

Following a brief period based in Paris, the MEK relocated to Iraq in 1986, where it found support from Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime amid the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), according to the US State Department.

The support for the group within Iran diluted during the war after it helped Saddam quash the Kurdish uprising in the north and Shia unrest in the south (1991). Nevertheless, it demonstrated a global outreach in April 1992, with coordinated raids on diplomatic missions in ten countries, including one at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York.

In 1997, the group was put on the US’ list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), which includes more than 50 groups like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, for these actions and the killing of six Americans in the 1970s.

Turnaround with the US

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the MEK struck a cease-fire deal with the US and temporarily confined its operations to Camp Ashraf in the Gulf country’s northeast. Since then, Washington has viewed the MEK’s members as “noncombatants” and “protected persons” under the Geneva Conventions.

In September 2012, under the Obama administration, the group reached an agreement with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and had itself removed from the FTO, unfreezing its assets.

The group’s political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which purportedly acts as a government-in-exile, opened its office in Washington DC in April 2013.