Word: mujahedin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mujahedin who are believed to have masterminded the escape of former President Abolhassan Banisadr, whom they supported, after he had been deposed by the government. Banisadr is now thought to be hiding in the Kurdish region in northwestern Iran...
...more than a decade of fierce and bloody battles with the Shah's secret police, the Mujahedin were renowned for fighting to the last bullet and then popping cyanide pills. But since the revolution they have displayed keen instincts for survival. After seizing some 70,000 weapons from armories when the Shah fell from power in 1979, they have bided their time, waiting for the proper moment to challenge the mullahs...
Today the Mujahedin are by far the best organized opposition to Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Their leader, Massoud Rajavi, 33, commands a force of guerrillas estimated to be as large as 100,000, with several hundred thousand supporters among the intellectuals, workers, farmers and middle class. Says a Western intelligence analyst: "The Mujahedin have the capacity to make life miserable for the ruling clerics. They are a threat to Khomeini's people because to the common man both groups seem to be cut from the same cloth-both proclaim they will create a true Islamic state...
Mostly young and educated, the Mujahedin charge that the ruling clergy's primitivism and "petit bourgeois understanding of Islam" merely pave the way for a return of Western exploitation in Iran. The guerrillas want to prod the revolution into breaking down class distinctions through a radical redistribution of wealth, collective farming, nationalization of the entire economy and government by decentralized councils...
...Mujahedin hope the clergy's brutal crackdown will create sympathy for their cause, just as it occurred in the final years of the Shah's reign. In that sense, the mullahs seem to be playing into their hands. Firing squads-killed more than 50 "counterrevolutionaries" last week; raising to at least 153 the number of people executed since Banisadr was deposed as President on June 22. Jails are so packed that new suspects are no longer detained, just beaten and dumped in alleys. Laments a prominent Tehran lawyer: "Iran has become a horror movie...