Iran Opposition Has Few Postwar Options

By DONNA BRYSON, Associated Press Writer 

Associated Press

April 22, 2003

CAIRO, Egypt - Iranian opposition fighters, labeled terrorist allies of Saddam Hussein by Washington, are nevertheless trying to persuade the United States to let them keep fighting the Iranian government from their bases in Iraq.

Although Iran and the United States are hardly friends, Washington is unlikely to agree to the request from the Mujahedeen Khalq fighters. In fact, Tuesday's expression of hope by the group was a measure of how very few options it has left.

The United States invaded Iraq to dislodge terrorists it said Saddam was harboring, as well as topple him and destroy any biological, chemical or nuclear weapons he was hiding. The Mujahedeen Khalq may be the biggest catch the U.S. military has so far made in the hunt for terrorists.

The only other success came this month in Baghdad, when Americans captured the terrorist mastermind known as Abul Abbas. His Palestine Liberation Front carried out the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murdered American passenger Leon Klinghoffer, but in more recent years he had allied himself with Palestinian peacemakers.

The Mujahedeen Khalq, though, was undeniably active, launching attacks on neighboring Iran from camps in Iraq. Saddam allowed the group to exist to get back at Iran, with whom he fought a 1980-88 war and which harbored Iraqi dissidents.

After bombing the camps, the United States announced Monday it was corralling the Iranian opposition fighters under a cease-fire agreement.

In a statement Tuesday from its president Massoud Rajavi, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the umbrella organization for the Mujahedeen Khalq, said the cease-fire simply formalized its neutrality in the U.S. war on Iraq. Rajavi added the group hoped to reach "an understanding" with the U.S. military to allow it to continue its campaign against Iran.

Charges by the Mujahedeen Khalq that Iran has sent anti-Saddam Iraqi fighters and its own government forces into Iraq have not been confirmed by the United States, which has cautioned Iran to stay out of Iraq.

John Calabrese, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said Iran may have worried that the United States would seek to enlist the Mujahedeen Khalq. Now that Tehran has instead seen a U.S. crackdown, it may respond by ensuring the anti-Saddam Iraqi militants it has harbored do not cause trouble in Iraq.

Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Britain, noted that predominantly Shiite Muslim Iran had cultivated Iraqi Shiite groups and no doubt has agents in Iraq now — not to fight, as the opposition charges, but to try to influence the shape of post-Saddam Iraq.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, a top National Council of Resistance official, said he believed Iran's ruling clerics, known as mullahs, wanted to recreate their conservative Islamic government in Iraq, and portrayed his fighters as a bulwark against that.

"Our war ... will continue until democracy comes back to Iraq," Ali Safavi told The Associated Press.

The United States also has called on Iran's ruling clerics to yield to democracy, and the National Council of Resistance has found friends in the U.S. Congress who say it offers a democratic alternative for Iran.

But the White House does not see the organization as an ally and lumps it with al-Qaida and Hezbollah as terrorist.

The State Department traces complaints back to the Mujahedeen Khalq's fight against the U.S.-backed shah of Iran beginning in the 1960s. After Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, the group began assassinations and bombings against the clerical government that replaced the shah.

More recently, according to the State Department, the Mujahedeen Khalq helped Saddam put down internal Iraqi uprisings in 1991 and "has continued to perform internal security services" for Iraq.

Mohaddessin said such charges against his group were unfounded and the result of Iranian propaganda. But he made no apologies for basing his fighters in Iraq for the past 17 years.

"One cannot wage a successful campaign from Los Angeles or Paris," Mohaddessin said from the group's Paris headquarters.

Finding a new base may prove difficult.

To Iran's north are former Soviet republics that have plenty of their own problems and no need to aggravate a neighbor. Turkey on the north and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east have relations with the United States to protect. Iran is bordered to the south by the Gulf.

The extent of support for Mohaddessin's group among Iranians is unclear.

"Iranians will never forget that they supported Saddam, a man who invaded our homeland, against their own country," said Karim Arqandehpour, a journalist. "A group that resorts to assassinations and bombings of public places can never win public support."