Word: rajavi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That she is one of thousands of women who have joined the rebel movement is a measure of the degree to which Tehran has trampled women's rights, says Maryam Rajavi. "The worst and most savage of the regime's repression is directed toward women," she says. "So in our army, women have key roles...
...National Council of Resistance of Iran (N.C.R.), the rebels' civilian arm, the N.L.A. will roll across the border in support of a general uprising against the fundamentalist Iranian government. "We intend to combine the army with the rising of social unrest to sweep away the mullahs," N.C.R. president Maryam Rajavi told Time. "The mullahs are a regime that doesn't understand any language other than force and power." N.C.R. leaders believe, perhaps too optimistically, that burgeoning discontent with Iran's faltering economy, which has led to open protests and riots in recent months, means their moment may soon...
...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...
...Wanna take a ride?" shouts Moujila Nasferi, a tank driver who left a comfortable life in the U.S. seven years ago to join Rajavi's warriors. Her face and hands stained black from cleaning her Russian T-55 tank's gun barrel, Nasferi slips into the small driver's hatch beneath the turret of the tank, which jumps as she jams it into gear and guides it easily across the desert. In Washington, where she lived from 1977 to 1989, "I had my own house, a car and a job, but I kept listening to reports of how bad things...
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...