Mullahs, Look! Women, Armed and Dangerous

Mullahs, Look! Women, Armed and Dangerous
By DOUGLAS JEHL

New York Times
December 30, 1996

In this enclave of Iraq, the road signs are in Persian and the soldiers pay tribute not to Iraq's President, Saddam Hussein, but to an Iranian woman they call Maryam.

''She is the symbol of our struggle,'' veiled young women chanted after storming into a fortified bunker in a military training exercise.

''She is the tip of the arrow,'' proclaimed another, a gunner in a Soviet-made tank.

By the map, Camp Ashraf lies in Iraq, 60 miles north of Baghdad. But a more accurate description would be the military headquarters of Iran-in-exile, and a place unto itself.

The sprawling camp is home to the leadership of the National Liberation Army, a formidable Iranian opposition force. It is also home to unfathomable devotion toward the 43-year-old woman her disciples say should be Iran's next leader.

''We love Maryam Rajavi,'' men in camouflage dress chanted after braving a pool of fire in an exercise of their own. ''And we promise to take her to Teheran.''

Built up on a barren salt plain beginning about a decade ago, the army, now some 30,000 strong, is by any measure the best-armed opposition force poised outside any country's borders. With raids deep into Iran in 1988, in the closing months of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, it equipped itself with some $2 billion worth of weapons, including American-made armored personnel carriers and British-made Chieftain tanks.

And while Iran and Iraq have meticulously observed a cease-fire since then, the presence of the opposition force reflects the enmity that the secular Government in Baghdad still feels toward Teheran and its mullahs' power.

Twice a day, at noon and midnight, Iraqi television even broadcasts a one-hour program prepared by the Iranian opposition group, which pays neither for that service nor for its land at Camp Ashraf and four other camps within 55 miles of the Iranian border.

But to hear its members tell it, the real strength of the National Liberation Army derives from faith in Mrs. Rajavi and her husband, Massoud, architects of a force so highly motivated and disciplined that it borders on the bizarre.

Uniforms display neither rank nor insignia, in an effort to promote ''camaraderie and fraternity in our struggle,'' said Kobra Tahmasbi, 39, a division commander.

Mrs. Tahmasbi and most other top officers are women, whose standard-issue attire includes khaki head scarves and modestly cut tunics that would be acceptable even on a Teheran street but who exercise an authority unimaginable at home.

Soldiers live communally, even into their 30's and 40's, bunking as many as 20 to a sex-segregated room. Since 1991, the married couples among them have put their marriages on ice: their children have been sent abroad, and those who once lived as husbands and wives now live chastely as brothers and sisters.

All rise promptly at 7 A.M. to begin their day with outdoor ceremonies that feature revolutionary hymns, oaths ''in the name of God and in the name of the people of Teheran'' and honor guards who stiffly bear the red, white and green Iranian colors. And there, as in most public rooms, they operate under the eyes of the Rajavis, whose photographs are invariably displayed front and center.

The leaders' images have even been affixed to some tank turrets, and crew members like Azadeh Salamet, 32, describe their leaders as a source of inspiration.

''As the years go on,'' said Ms. Salamet, who abandoned her marriage and studies at the University of Washington to take up arms in Iraq in 1988, ''my faith in both of them grows more and more.''

Massoud Rajavi, a former student of political science at the University of Teheran, was long a prominent figure in the People's Mujahedeen of Iran, a group formed in the early 1960's in opposition to Shah Riza Pahlevi. After the 1979 Islamic revolution, the group broke with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini over his ouster of President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, endorsed a campaign of armed struggle and became a powerful voice of anti-theocratic dissent.

After fleeing to Paris in 1982, he married the future Mrs. Rajavi, a metallurgical engineer who had been a student leader in Teheran, and together they established under their command the National Liberation Army, the military wing of the National Council of Resistance, a coalition of Iranian opposition groups abroad.

Only twice since its formation has the opposition army fought head-to-head against Iran, in the operations of 1988, when it once pushed more than 100 miles into Iran, and in 1991, when Iran's Revolutionary Guards invaded Iraq in an attempt to crush the resistance at the end of the Persian Gulf war.

By most accounts, the National Liberation Army has acquitted itself well, demonstrating an ability to confront and defeat some of Iran's best armored units. It has also withstood years of indirect attacks, including an Iranian Scud missile attack in 1991, and shootings and car bombings even at its office in Baghdad as part of a worldwide Iranian assassination campaign. The force has been well-financed, mostly by contributions to the National Council of Resistance from inside Iran, its top officials say.

Despite an aggressive public-relations campaign, it has never managed to win an American embrace. In a report two years ago, the State Department cited the organization's past Marxist leanings and allegations that elements of the council took part in violent attacks against Americans in the early 1970's, and concluded that it did not represent an acceptable alternative in Iran.

That American report also labeled the group as ''undemocratic,'' criticized its reliance on hospitality of the Iraqi Government, and warned that its ''authoritarian leadership'' had created ''a personality cult.''

But such criticism appears to have done nothing to diminish the adulation shown in places like Camp Ashraf, where followers say they dream of the day that Maryam Rajavi assumes a role the organization voted her in 1993: as the transitional President who would wield power after the fall of the Iranian Government

As soldiers and officers filed into a dining hall for lunch here today, a huge photograph of Mrs. Rajavi, smiling beatifically, stood perched on an easel at the head of the room. Around the room, television sets were showing videotapes of Mrs. Rajavi's triumphal return this month to Iraq after three years in Paris, the organization's political headquarters, and there were throaty cheers.

''I have found my final answer in Maryam Rajavi,'' said Mohammed Taslimi, 46, a political prisoner under the Shah who is the camp's chief of logistics. ''Maryam Rajavi is anathema to the Khomeini ideology, and that's why she is the cure.''