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MEK welcomes IRGC designation

After all, the Iranian regime has admitted to sending agents to the United States and other nations under the guise of journalists to spy on or attack the MEK.

In August 2018, authorities in the US arrested two members of the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS) for attending MEK events and taking photos of MEK members so that the Regime could plot a terror attack against the MEK. That is without even mentioning the terror plots against the MEK in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Albania that the Regime tried to carry out last year.

Shortly before the designation, Ali Safavi, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) – a coalition of Iranian dissident groups with the MEK as its largest member – wrote an op-ed urging the world to recognise the threat of Iranian state-sponsored terror. He said that the MOIS and IRGC, which already appear on the US government’s Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) blacklist, should be included in the US’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list, for:

  • their terror plots against the MEK on US soil
  • their terrorist training facilities in many other countries
  • their role in the deaths of 608 US service members in Iraq
  • the many thousands of Iranians it has tortured and killed
  • the suppression of the MEK inside Iran

Safavi explained that for a group to be included on the FTO list, they must be a foreign organization that engages in terror activities or has “the capability and intent to engage” in terrorist activities and poses a threat to US nationals or the security of the US. He says that the IRGC and MOIS clearly meet those requirements.

Human rights advocate Hassan Mahmoudi also wrote an op-ed on IRGC designation last weekend, where he said it would “ramp up pressure on the elite force” and would be welcomed by the Iranian opposition, including the NCRI, MEK, and MEK president-elect Maryam Rajavi.

Rajavi, who has been MEK leader since 1993, has loudly called for an end to the West’s appeasement policy on Iran, which would include designation of the IRGC and MOIS. In January, she urged the US to place the IRGC on its FTO and for Iranian human rights abuses to  be referred to the UN Security Council.

Mahmoudi said: “[The West’s] inaction regarding the IRGC and MOIS has further enabled the regime to set up missile factories in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq in order to broaden its regional sphere of influence.”

This designation, the MEK explains, is not just symbolic, but will actually make it illegal for any US person to provide material “support or resources”, including advice, to these entities and allow the US to remove MOIS or IRGC officials from their country.

 

 

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