Word: forghan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that U.S. policymakers were responsible for the death of every Iranian killed during the revolution. "Who gave the deposed Shah his weapons?" asked Rafsanjani. "Who supported him as long as he could kill?" At week's end Rafsanjani was himself shot and wounded in an assassination attempt by Forghan, a terrorist group that earlier killed a former army chief of staff and Ayatullah Morteza Motahari, one of Iran's leading theologians...
Wherever the Shah ends up, there will be fewer Iranian newspapers around to report it. Apparently angered by an article about Forghan, a terrorist group that last month killed a member of Iran's ruling Islamic Revolutionary Council, the Ayatullah Khomeini declared that he would never again read Ayandegan, Tehran's leading morning daily (circ. 400,000). After thousands of rock-throwing demonstrators massed at the paper's office, editors published a farewell issue consisting of a front-page editorial and three blank pages. Said the editorial: "Until the government clarifies its position regarding the press...
...aftermath of the terrorist assassinations by a group calling itself Forghan, few moderates were willing to speak out, for fear of being accused of aiding counterrevolutionaries. Premier Mehdi Bazargan cautioned against becoming "tyrants ourselves," but the public generally was still overwhelmingly in favor of the trials. "Let the Western press and the so-called human rights organizations howl on," voiced Radio Iran. "Their double standards fool nobody. The revolutionary tribunals have a bereaved nation to account to. They may not desecrate the sacred memory of tens of thousands of our martyrs by being lenient to these criminals...
Although twelve reputed members of Forghan are reported to have been arrested for the murders of Motahari and Major General Mohammed Vali Gharani, former army Chief of Staff, the government was releasing little information on the case. Leaflets left by the group tried to portray its members as devoted to "Islam without the clergy." But many observers, in fact, believe that the professionally carried-out assassinations were the work of former SAVAK agents bent on creating anarchy or of vengeance squads associated with former top officials who have been executed...
Iran's Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, the onetime Houston microbiologist who has emerged as a key figure in the revolutionary government, dismisses the Forghan charge of too much akhoundism in Iran. In an interview with TIME last week (see box), he charged that such accusations are part of the strategy of the government's enemies, which is "to frustrate the revolution through protracted psychological warfare...