Maryam Rajavi first became involved in the resistance movement when she was an engineering student at Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology in the 1970s.

Maryam Rajavi joined the student movement of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) in 1973 and served in the group’s social department from 1979 to 1981, during which time she also stood as a candidate for parliament in the first elections following the overthrow of the shah. Maryam Rajavi received over 250,000 votes, but did not gain a seat in parliament, which was later discovered to be the result of widespread voter fraud on behalf of the mullahs that kept all opposition leaders out of parliament.

It was then that Maryam Rajavi suffered another loss, this time at the hands of the mullahs. Her pregnant sister Massoumeh, an industrial engineering student, was arrested, tortured, and hanged for her activism.

In 1985, Maryam Rajavi became joint-leader of the MEK for four years, before becoming its secretary general in 1989. Then in 1993, she took up her current post as president-elect of the parliament-in-exile National Council of Resistance of Iran; a coalition of democratic Iranian opposition groups, with the MEK as its largest member.

Maryam Rajavi’s role is to lead the Iranian people and their organised democratic resistance to the overthrow of the mullahs and to a free Iran. She will serve as the President of Iran for a transitional period, not to exceed six months, until a free and fair election can be held and a truly representative national assembly can be formed. Maryam Rajavi will then hand over power to the elected representatives.

Until that day, Maryam Rajavi serves as a figurehead for the Iranian resistance, inspiring people across Iran to rise up against the mullahs, as well as the head of the true Iranian government.

In her tenure as president of the Iranian Resistance, Maryam Rajavi has achieved so many objectives that it is hard to list them all here, but we will do so briefly. She has:

• Increased the number of women holding leadership positions in the Iranian Resistance to over 50% of total roles

• Made numerous speeches about the tolerant and democratic Islam and decried fundamentalism

• Made the case for the international community not to appease or launch a war on the Iranian Regime, but to instead support the Iranian people and their democratic resistance

• Garnered worldwide support for the Iranian resistance

• Achieved the safe relocation of MEK members from Iraq, where they faced attacks from the Iran-backed government, to Albania

• Successfully led the campaign to remove the MEK from terror watch lists, where they were wrongly placed to appease the Regime

• Started the movement calling for justice for the 30,000 victims of the 1988 Iranian massacre, which largely targeted MEK members

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