often failing to obey orders from Washington and taking actions that have tangled up the group’s legal status.
The study also says that the US Army at first wanted to use the group as an intelligence source on Iran, but soon determined it was useless for any intelligence purpose.
The 105-page report was drafted by the Rand Corp., a federally 
funded think tank that does most of its work for the Defense Department. The report, entitled “The Mujahedin-e Khalq in Iraq: A Policy Conundrum,” was sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which comes in for a fair amount of criticism in the report.
When the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, it bombed Camp Ashraf and other Mojahedin bases. Rand quoted a former White House staffer as saying that was part of an agreement with the Islamic Republic reached in January 2003 under which Iran pledged support for subsequent reconstruction efforts and cooperation in rescuing any pilots who might be downed over Iran.
Many studies of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq have complained about inadequate pre-invasion planning. The Rand study says that critique applies to how the Mojahedin were handled as well. “Planners did not,” Rand wrote, “provide field commanders with guidance about what to do [with the group] following combat.”
The American troops who met the Mojahedin knew nothing whatsoever about it. They believed the group’s leaders when they said they had never fired on US troops—although Rand says combat records show there was at least one special forces casualty resulting from Mojahedin firing. They also believed the Mojahedin leaders who asserted that the group had offered to fight on behalf of the American invading troops. And they believed false assertions that many members of the group had advanced degrees from universities in the United States and family members living in the United States.
The group’s negotiators were largely fluent in English and chiefly women. In the end, the junior Army officers signed a ceasefire agreement, not a surrender agreement as called for in their orders, and allowed the Mojahedin to keep its weapons.
Washington was stunned and said that would not do. The Army was told to go back to the Mojahedin and insist on a surrender with the group giving up all its arms. But again, the Mo-jahedin sweet-talked the Army into signing another ceasefire, not a surrender, although it provided for the group to give up all its weapons.
The absence of a formal surrender agreement was the first step in confusing the legal status of the group.
The study says the US Army never took control of Camp Ashraf. Rather, it left the Mojahedin leadership in charge of the camp while setting up a US Army liaison office just outside the camp. There was no fence around the perimeter of the camp. The US Army did not patrol inside the camp.
Some Army officers expressed concerns to Rand that the Mojahedin might be holding dissident members as prisoners inside buildings in the camp, but nothing was ever done to see if that was true. The Mojahedin told the US Army that 200 members joined the group inside the camp after June 2004, something the Army had never known anything about because of its lax controls.
The Rand study says prisoner of war conventions require that officers be separated from enlisted personnel. But it says the US Army failed to do that with the Mojahedin, allowing the Mojahedin leadership to continue to control members who had weak ties to the group and might have wanted to leave it.
Rand said part of the problem was lack of manpower. The U.S. Army invaded Iraq with barely 100,000 men, and, while those numbers were adequate to smash Saddam Hussein’s army, they were never sufficient to seriously occupy the entire country.
The United States later sent about 70 US government civilians—from the FBI, State Department, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security—to review the cases of each Mojahedin member at the camp. The Mojahedin were placed into four categories: eligible for release; detain for potential prosecution in the United States; detain as having possible intelligence value; detain as a security threat or risk.
Almost everyone was put in the eligible for release category. No one was seen as having any intelligence value. Only a handful were found to be possibly prosecutable in the United States or to be a security risk.
Because of the jumbled way the United States had handled the group with a ceasefire rather than surrender, the legal status of the almost 4,000 Mojahedin members was uncertain—and that provided an insurmountable hurdle.
The United States tried to get other countries to accept the members, but no country would take anyone who lacked citizenship or residency rights, which accounted for only a few dozen. The United States then proposed that all the Mojahedin members at the camp be declared refugees, making them eligible for residency in many countries. But the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) refused to consider any applications since the legal status of all the group’s members was so confused. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also raised the same point in keeping its distance.
About 250 of the Mojahedin members sought to return to Iran and accept the Islamic Republic’s amnesty, which excludes about 100 leaders of the group. The ICRC helped them to return and there have been no reports of mistreatment by the Iranian government.
About 200 others broke with the group but did not wish to return to Iran. In late 2008, the Rand report says, they were resettled in Iraq’s Kurdish region under an agreement with the Kurdish Regional Government.
Rand argues that the Bush Administration backed itself into a legal and logical black hole when it made the heavily criticized 2001 decision to proclaim that terrorist groups, referring to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, were exempt from the protection of the Geneva Conventions. It then made mincemeat of that decision when on June 25, 2004, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unilaterally declared members of the Mojahedin, a terrorist group under U.S. law, to be “protected persons” under the Geneva Conventions.
The Rand report exudes a certain disgust that the US Army unit at Camp Ashraf did nothing to carry out its orders to encourage defectors from the Moja-hedin. Anyone the Army identified as a potential defector was made known to the Mojahedin leadership, which was allowed to conduct a multi-day debriefing before those people were turned over to the US Army. “Although the debriefing was clearly a ploy to threaten [Mojahedin] members with detainment in retaliation for their requests to leave the group, the [US Army unit at Camp Ashraf] allowed it,” Rand wrote.
Furthermore, the Mojahedin built barricades between the camp and the US Army liaison office “clearly” for the purpose of tackling anyone trying to defect. The US Army “did not prevent [the barricades] from being built, force the [Mojahedin] to destroy them, or destroy them itself. Its only act of resistance was to refuse the [Mojahedin’s] 2007 request for more concertina wire,” Rand said with a note of disbelief.
Rand was clearly impressed with the ability of the Mojahedin to get its way with the junior Army officers sent to deal with it despite total ignorance about the group. But it was not impressed with the Mojahedin otherwise.
“A visit to the [Mojahedin] library at Camp Ashraf makes it evident that its purpose is not to expand minds,” Rand commented. “However, with portraits of American and European writers lining the garden path that leads to the library, the [Mojahedin] uses the facility to attempt to persuade visitors that it encourages freedom of thought.”
As for the Mojahedin’s proclaimed devotion to gender equality, Rand wrote, “Shaking hands is prohibited across genders. Even the gas station at Camp Ashraf has separate hours for men and women.”
