Word: iranian
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...Iranian population is generally frightened of or repelled by [the NCRI], and the supporters in [Iran] ... have all mostly vanished," says Olivier Roy, one of France's leading experts on Middle East politics and Islam. "It now basically operates abroad as a sect with international branches whose membership is dwindling as its base grows older and young people shun...
...ability to operate inside the country. Operatives there, he says, are busy gathering intelligence and organizing to undermine the regime. According to Mohaddessin, sympathizers secretly monitored more than half the polling stations during the presidential election, providing the NCRI with enough information to claim that scarcely 15% of Iranian voters bothered casting ballots at all, a number at odds with the reportedly massive turnout seen by foreign media and other observers and the government figure that put participation at 85%. (See five reasons to suspect Iran's election results...
...NCRI was founded in 1981 to serve as an umbrella organization to Iranian opposition groups, and its dominant force has always been the MEK, which espouses a curious mix of Marxism and Islamist militancy. MEK originally worked with radical Islamist organizations to topple the Shah and rid Iran of what it described as Western imperialism. In the wake of the 1979 revolution, though, the group found itself under attack by its former allies in the new Islamic regime and took up arms. Its military wing was based in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. From there, MEK carried out assassination and terrorist...
...Many Iranians know victims of MEK violence or still feel the fear and fury its name provokes," says a French counterterrorism official who has followed the NCRI and MEK. "Because MEK remains widely hated in Iran, the mere threat by Iranian leaders that it and NCRI are waiting to take over in the event of crisis tends to chill musings of regime change in Iranian streets...
...Middle East expert Roy says the claims and counterclaims miss the bigger point. While Iranian leaders obsessively hate the NCRI for historical reasons, he says, the NCRI is largely an irrelevancy these days. "Tehran uses it as a scarecrow with its own change-hungry public, while Western nations use it as a way of rewarding or punishing Iran," Roy says. "More or less consideration given to [NCRI] can act as punishment or reward for Iranian action. Meanwhile, the group itself does little beyond grow weaker with time...