about the number of members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq they will accept from Iraq as refugees.
Meanwhile, more members of the group moved last week from Camp Ashraf to Camp Hurriya.
If the UN conference comes off as planned, it will be the biggest development yet in a decade of trying to move the group’s 3,400 members out of Iraq.
Claire Bourgeois, head of the Baghdad office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told Deutsche Presse Agentur last week, “We are going to hold a conference on the matter March 23 in Geneva and hope to finally receive firm pledges to accept the refugees.”
The United States started looking for countries to host the group’s members in 2003. Nine years have passed without any volunteers so far emerging.
The EU launched an effort last year to induce each of the EU’s 27 member states to take some number of Mojahedin-e Khalq members in as refugees, and this conference next Friday may be the culmination of that.
Meanwhile, a second group of about 400 Mojahedin members moved from Camp Ashraf to Camp Hurriya near Baghdad last Thursday, the State Department announced. There are now about 800 Mojahedin members at Camp Hurriya and about 2,600 remaining at Ashraf.
It wasn’t known what induced the group to allow another 400 to move after objecting vehemently to conditions being inhuman at Hurriya. However, the move came just days after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she might remove the Mojahedin-e Khalq from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations if the group’s members would all leave Ashraf and move to Hurriya, where the processing by the UNHCR takes place.