In an interview with the Iranian Students News Agency, Ambassador Hassan Danaifar said, “Except for nearly 100 individuals, against whom legal charges have been filed with the Judiciary, all other residents of the camp may return to our dear Iran or travel anywhere else they wish.”
Danaifar, however, failed either to announce the precise number of those charged or to release a list of those facing charges, so his announcement failed to provide any real encouragement for Mojahedin members to return to Iran.
The Islamic Republic has often said that it only wishes to punish the leaders of the group and those who actually engaged in attacks on Iran. But this is the first time it has said those categories number less than 100. If true, that suggests that the Mojahedin’s cross-border terrorist operations were really very limited in scope and far from the huge scale Iran has painted them as being for decades.
Just last week, Iranian Justice Minister Morteza Bakhtiari said the Mojahedin-e Khalq killed 12,000 Iranians in decades of terrorist actions inside Iran. He repeated the official canard that the United States supports the group’s terrorism.
Since the United States captured Iraq and confined the Mojahedin to Camp Ashraf, about 300 have contacted the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and been returned to Iran by the ICRC. The regime has gone out of its way to welcome them home, though it isn’t known how they have been treated after the welcoming ceremony.
Only a handful of Moja-hedin members have been accepted by third countries where they had relatives or citizenship prior to joining the group in Iraq.
Danaifar said those returning other than the unnamed one hundred would be granted amnesty on their return.