February 14-2014
The House Foreign Affairs Committee last week held a hearing on Al-Qaeda’s resurgence in Iraq, but many of the committee members were more interested in talking about the Mojahedin-e Khalq.
American supporters of the group – including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich – say the United States has abandoned its pledge to protect the group, which was disarmed by the US Army after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
A few hundred members were relocated last year to Albania and Germany, but about 3,200 remain in Iraq, where they are periodically attacked.
Eight members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee – six Republicans and two Democrats – lambasted the US government at the hearing for failing to do more to help the Mojahedin-e Khalq members.
The most forceful was Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who called Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki a “murderer” and said the United States had no business helping him on other issues, such as the fight against Al-Qaeda in western Iraq. Another Republican, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, complained that the Mojahedin-e Khalq members housed at Camp Hurriya, a former US Army base near Baghdad, “still have very little protection” and demanded “extra effort in saving lives there.”
Brett McGurk, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran, had been called to testify about Al-Qaeda but found himself answering as many if not more questions about the Mojahedin. McGurk, who visited Camp Hurriya this month, said talks were ongoing to resettle the residents and get them more protections in the meantime.
“I told them I promise I would do everything I could,” McGurk said of his talks with members in the camp.
Critics have noted that Rohrabacher, Ros-Lehtinen and other congressional supporters of the group have received thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Iranian-American groups, or their leaders, that support the Mojahedin.
Shirin Nariman, a Virginia-based Mojahedin activist, told the McClatchy newspaper chain that some had received money from Mojahedin supporters. But she said that more important than campaign donations and speaker fees was the time the group had spent knocking on the doors of American politicians, making them aware of the group’s cause.
“Tom Ridge told me once, ‘When I sit down and hear the stories of the mothers, it gets to me,’ ” Nariman recalled. “It touches their hearts. They’re humans, and it doesn’t matter how much they get paid.”
The group and its supporters are urging the Obama Administration to resettle members in the United States, in hopes the move will make other countries more amenable to accepting them.
Nariman said, “Even if they bring a handful, if they just start, it’ll show there’s goodwill and other countries will start picking them up. But that hasn’t been done.”