Word: rajavi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Formed just one year ago by Massoud Rajavi, 40, a longtime foe of Khomeini, and his wife Maryam, the N.L.A. consists of 15,000-to-25,000 fighters, and is backed by the Iraqi regime. Although the Iranians acknowledged their defeat at Mehran, they insisted it had been inflicted by Iraqi troops using chemical weapons. Baghdad denied any involvement in the battle. At week's end, however, Iraq did claim that its forces had recaptured the oil-rich Majnoun islands east of the Tigris River, where Iranian defenders had been entrenched since...
...another Lebanese group, the freeing of Cornea was an acknowledgment by pro-Iranian terrorists of the political benefits of kidnaping. Cornea's captors noted that France had begun to take "serious steps" toward meeting their demands. In June, for example, the French compelled an Iranian opposition leader, Massoud Rajavi, and 300 of his mujahedin followers to leave France for Baghdad. In November France agreed to make an initial payment on a $1 billion loan extended in 1975 by the late Shah to the French nuclear power program...
IRAN AIR. In July 1983 a jumbo jet bound from Shiraz in southwestern Iran to Tehran was hijacked with 386 passengers aboard by six Iranians opposed to Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. After diverting the plane to Paris, Massoud Rajavi, an exiled leader of the mujahedin opposition to Khomeini, encouraged the hijackers to surrender. One inducement: they would be tried in French courts instead of being deported to Iran. No passengers were harmed...
...although they have scored relatively few victories recently, the guerrillas are by no means ready to accept defeat. "We are dealing with Khomeini in our own way," Mujahedin National Commander Ali Zarkesh, 34, said in his Tehran hideout to an Iranian journalist. (The group's overall leader, Massoud Rajavi, is in exile in Paris.) "We are slowly suffocating his regime, spreading a creeping paralysis throughout his military-police apparatus." The most wanted man on the Ayatullah's hit list, Zarkesh remains convinced that the ruling clerics could be brought down by a violent upsurge of the same sort...
...dissident activities. After the Shah's fall, Ganje'i sided with what he calls the "progressive" Islam of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a guerrilla organization that is now trying to overthrow the Tehran government. In early February he fled to Paris to join Mujahedin Leader Massoud Rajavi in exile. Excerpts from an interview with TIME Correspondent Raji Samghabadi...