Word: mujahedin
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Successors to the leftist People's Mujahedin, which helped overthrow Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the soldiers of the rebel force are bivouacked in five camps in the barren salt desert of Iraq, just out of range of Iranian artillery. Critics call them pawns of the Iraqis, who are said to have given the resisters money and arms in addition to a generous swath of desert land. They also say Rajavi hardly represents a democratic alternative to the current regime...
Rajavi, a former student leader trained as a metallurgical engineer, rules the rebel force together with her husband Massoud, who was head of the People's Mujahedin when the Shah was overthrown and exiled in 1979. Massoud was soon forced to flee the country as the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini began killing and imprisoning Massoud's largely secular followers. Since then Maryam and Massoud have built up not only one of the world's most formidable rebel armies but a sophisticated resistance movement as well, with offices around the world, plus five radio stations and a new satellite-television network that...
Notwithstanding their credentials as fighters against a government Washington loves to hate, the N.C.R. and the N.L.A. have no backing on the banks of the Potomac. Clinton Administration officials stand by a 1994 State Department report that accuses Massoud Rajavi and other People's Mujahedin leaders of terror against the U.S. in the 1970s. The report goes on to charge that the group still has Marxist leanings, strong ties to Saddam Hussein and few democratic tendencies. "There is a cult of personality around Massoud and Maryam Rajavi that is unhealthy," says Michael Eisenstadt, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute...
After the Soviets left, the Islamic fighters who opposed them--the mujahedin--separated into factions that turned on one another and the government. Last year a new group began knocking at the city's gates: the Taliban, an army of self-styled "students" of Islamic fundamentalism. Having repeatedly failed to take the capital, 8,000 Taliban are now camped on the high ground south, hurling rockets into the city. They announce themselves with the sound of a jet; a second of silence follows, then an explosion makes the earth tremble. It is not unusual for 15 to land...
...town called Jaji, not far from the Pakistani border. To Arabs, it was one of the first demonstrations that the Russians could actually be beaten. A year later, bin Laden led an offensive against Soviet troops in the battle of Shaban. Vicious hand-to-hand fighting claimed heavy mujahedin casualties, but his men succeeded in pushing the Soviets out of the area...