From the archive: Terrorists, cultists – or champions of Iranian democracy? The wild wild story of the MEK

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  This is The Guardian.

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  The Guardian Archive, long read.

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  Hello, my name is Aaron Reza Merritt.

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  I'm the author of Terrorists, Cultists, or Champions of Iranian Democracy, The Wild Wild Story of the MEK,

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  published in McGardian in 2018. What fascinated me about this story is how a group,

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  which really was on the cusp of power in the years after the 1979 revolution, became a strange,

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  cultish, irrelevant, highly violent, highly insular group living in a field in Albania of all places.

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  And how they got to Albania was part of the story I wanted to tell.

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  After they lost the power struggle in the early 80s, the Wujahideen fought with Saddam

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  Hussein against Iran and really turned themselves in the eyes of many Iranians into traitors,

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  or as they're called in Iran, the hypocrites.

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  And thousands of these Iranian revolutionaries lived in a desert compound in Iraq,

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  where they exhibited increasingly cultish behavior, including thought control, sexual abuse,

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  meted out by Masoud Rajavi who disappeared his wife Mariam Rajavi now runs the organization

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