DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran’s hard-line judiciary chief won a landslide victory Saturday in the country’s presidential election, a vote that both propelled the supreme leader’s protege into Tehran’s highest civilian position and saw the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history.
Raisi also has become the first serving Iranian president sanctioned by the U.S. government even before entering office over his involvement in the 1988 mass executions, as well as his time as the head of Iran’s internationally criticized judiciary — one of the world’s top executioners. The U.S. State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The election of Ebrahim Raisi, already sanctioned by the U.S. in part over his
involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988,
became more of a coronation after his strongest competition found themselves
disqualified from running.
The Mujahedeen-e-Khalq of Iran or MEK, is a controversial Iranian resistance group; it was once listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the United States and UK.
After the fall of Pahlavi, the MEK refused to take part in the constitutional referendum of the new government, which led to Khomeini preventing MEK members from running for office in the new government. By early 1981, authorities had banned the MEK, driving the organization underground.
The MEK then sided with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war taking part in several operations against the Iran, a decision that was viewed as treason by the vast majority of Iranians.
Anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-American, MEK fighters killed scores of the Shah’s police in often suicidal street battles during the 1970s. The group targeted US-owned hotels, airlines and oil companies, and was responsible for the deaths of six Americans in Iran. “Death to America by blood and bonfire on the lips of every Muslim is the cry of the Iranian people,” went one of its most famous songs. “May America be annihilated.”
MEK killed more than 70 senior leaders of the Islamic republic – including the president and Iran’s chief justice – in audacious bomb attacks.
Saddam Hussein, who was fighting a bloody war against Iran with the backing of the UK and the US, saw an opportunity to deploy the exiled MEK fighters against the Islamic republic. In 1986, he offered the group weapons, cash and a vast military base named Camp Ashraf, only 50 miles from the border with Iran.
For almost two decades, the MEK staged attacks against civilian and military targets across the border in Iran and helped Saddam suppress his own domestic enemies. But after siding with Saddam – who indiscriminately bombed Iranian cities and routinely used chemical weapons in a war that cost a million lives – the MEK lost nearly all the support it had retained inside Iran. Members were now widely regarded as traitors.
After the US invasion of Iraq, the MEK launched a lavish lobbying campaignto reverse its designation as a terrorist organisation – despite reports implicating the group in assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists as recently as 2012.
MEK has won considerable support from sections of the US and European right, eager for allies in the fight against Tehran.
In 2009, the UK delisted the MEK as a terror group. The Obama administration removed the group from the US terror list in 2012, and later helped negotiate its relocation to Albania.
