For months, the only way Reza Amiri could tell night from day was through a few holes in the roof of his Iranian prison cell. The 31-year-old was arrested, along with a group of dissidents protesting the regime, in June 2018. He escaped the country in March of last year but still fears for family members who remain in the country.
Amiri spoke with the Washington Examiner over the phone, recounting how he ended up in prison, and spoke about his hopes for an Iran free of dynastic or theocratic rule. Once kept in solitary confinement where he said his captors withheld food and sleep, he now is free and living in an undisclosed location. While many Iranians support a number of dissident groups, Amiri joined the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or Mojahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, which is actively working to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
Born into a “nonpolitical family,” Amiri learned about the resistance group about six years ago from news and social media. The group is reviled by the Iranian government, which has labeled it a terrorist organization and killed thousands of its members.
He said that he began direct involvement with the group after meeting MEK members during protests in Iran. Amiri recounted how he and others would hang banners of Maryam Rajavi in public places in defiance toward the regime.
Rajavi, 66, leads MEK, along with her husband, 71-year-old Massoud Rajavi. Despite still being,
in name, one of the leaders of the organization, Massoud has not been seen publicly since he disappeared in 2003. Maryam Rajavi is the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s president-elect.
The group has a controversial past and has raised eyebrows over allegations that its members live under strict rules, must remain celibate, and that members pledge fealty to the group above personal relationships. Founded in 1965 by students opposed to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the organization originally was a unique blend of Islam and Karl Marx.
During the 1970s, while the group aimed to topple Pahlavi and still incorporated elements of Marxism into its ideology, the MEK was accused by the United States of killing Americans and launching attacks against the regime. After supporting the 1979 revolution, the group began to oppose and be opposed by the newly formed regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini soon began to crack down on the group, branding them “unbelievers.”
In 1981, Massoud Rajavi fled to Paris to avoid arrest. The MEK found shelter in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where his government helped train thousands of members to fight against Iran. Subsequently, Iran further cracked down on supporters, executing thousands in 1988.
After the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, American forces seized the MEK’s weapons but promised to protect its members. On Sept. 1, 2013, Iranian-backed militias led by Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, who was killed in a January drone strike against Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani, stormed Camp Ashraf in Iraq where resistance supporters were held. More than 50 people were killed.
The MEK was considered by the U.S. to be a terrorist group from 1997 until Secretary of State Hilary Clinton removed the group from the list in 2012. The group began to coalesce U.S. support and, at the time it was delisted, the State Department said, “The Secretary’s decision today took into account the MEK’s public renunciation of violence, the absence of confirmed acts of terrorism by the MEK for more than a decade, and their cooperation in the peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf, their historic paramilitary base.”
Despite past controversy, the modern MEK has seen strong support from prominent figures from both ends of the political spectrum.
Among those who lobbied on behalf for the group are former CIA Directors R. James Woolsey and Porter Goss, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Gen. James Jones, President George W. Bush’s homeland security chief Tom Ridge, and Louis Freeh, who was head of the FBI when the MEK was first listed as a terrorist organization.
Current and former Trump-adjacent supporting figures include Rudy Giuliani and former national security adviser John Bolton.
The prominent support has led many to view the National Council of Resistance of Iran as the viable alternative to the government in place now and a force to help people such as Amiri resist the Iranian regime led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Within Iran, membership in the MEK brings government retribution, such as the type Amiri said he endured.
Amiri said he was arrested with a group of other MEK dissidents by armed intelligence agents in June 2018. After the arrest, forces raided his home and took his family’s electronic devices.
He was placed in solitary confinement in a prison in Tehran.
“They put pressure on me to confess and to regret,” Amiri said. “For example: forced insomnia. They didn’t allow me to sleep. They cut my food.”
He said interrogators put pressure on his family and brought them to the prison where he was being held to try and coerce him into talking about his involvement in the resistance. Amiri said that, while in solitary, he could hear other prisoners shouting.
“I told them: ‘I am a supporter of MEK. You can do [any]thing you want. You can torture me. You can execute me,’” he said of the interrogations. “I insisted in my causes.”
Amiri said the longer he refused to give away information about the resistance network within Iran, the more he was pressured.
“They wanted me to rely on them, to ask something from them,” he explained, “but I didn’t do that.”
He kept his fortitude by thinking about the prisoners who were jailed and executed during one of the regime’s notorious 1988 purge of dissidents. That year, thousands of MEK activists who spoke out against the regime were secretly executed without trials.
“When they arrested me, I was really afraid about my future, but, gradually, I became stronger by their torture,” he said.
“They threatened me to be physically abused, to be raped,” Amiri said. He explained that authorities told him he would be placed with nonpolitical and violent prisoners who would sexually abuse him.
“On the first night, 17 people will rape you,” Amiri recounted the interrogators telling him. “These things, they just want to break me. They wanted to break my resistance.”
Ramesh Sepehrrad, a scholar-practitioner of conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University, told the Washington Examiner that the type of abuse that Amiri said he experienced was typical of the way Iranian authorities treat MEK supporters.
“The Iranian regime does not make a distinction between age or gender in terms of discriminating against anyone who is pro-MEK, and what they do, typically, is, once the sympathizers or the members of MEK are arrested, they face persecution, torture, even mocked executions,” Sepehrrad said.
Sharing stories such as Amiri’s is important, she said, because it “gives the international community a window into what is happening to Iranian prisoners today.”
“We are dealing with an urgent situation,” Sepehrrad said, arguing that there needs to be international pressure put on the regime to “save the lives of these protesters that have been arrested.”
Amiri said that, after being isolated and threatened, he grew more defiant and confronted the interrogators about the extrajudicial killings in 1988.
“But they didn’t answer me. I [turned] the table against them, sometimes, in the interrogations,” Amiri said. “I told them that, as a youth, you didn’t answer my questions.”
Shahin Gobadi, a Paris-based spokesman for the MEK, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner that the defiance among those who are arrested is common and that many of the regime’s tactics are “rendered futile” because of the spirit of the protesters.
“The political prisoners in Iran are subject to all sorts of physical and psychological torture and are deprived of some of their most rudimentary rights,” Gobadi said. “The prisoners have a very high spirit, and more young people are joining the resistance in recent years and months.”
Amiri was in solitary confinement for three months of his imprisonment and was then put in cells with a few other prisoners, both political and nonpolitical. Amiri said the guards would rotate the prisoners out to different cells. He couldn’t get too close or be too open with the others, though, because some of those placed in the cell could be a “rat” and would tell the regime what he said behind the bars.
While imprisoned, Amiri was completely disconnected from the outside world, but, on the outside, his family fought for his release.
“My family supported me a lot,” he said, noting that his family came to the prison and lobbied the judge on his behalf. Amiri said that the judge eventually agreed to release him for a short period as long as his family put up a property document as a form of bail.
After he got out of prison, he rekindled his relationship with the MEK. He couldn’t speak of how he fled the country, he said, because it could cause harm to other political prisoners who are also trying to escape the regime.
“I didn’t even tell my family or other friends and relatives that I was going out of the country because it has risk for them if the regime found out that they knew,” he said.
He said that, after his escape, his whole family was interrogated, but, “because they didn’t know anything, they let them go.”
After the escape, Amiri was sentenced to 18 years in prison in absentia. He said he worries that his family could have its property taken, which it had put up as bail for his release.
“I hope that my friends and the people of Iran will overthrow the regime before then,” Amiri said.
Amiri said he is safe and no longer fears the regime will find him, but he said he worries about his family that is still in Iran. Amiri said he believes that people are becoming less afraid to speak out against the regime.
Protesters in Iran called for Khamenei to step down after Iran admitted that it shot down a Ukrainian airliner in January, killing all 176 people on board. The downing of the jet was a second heavy blow to the regime after the U.S. killed Soleimani.
Sepehrrad said that she believes the regime could be overthrown in a matter of months, not years, and that Soleimani’s death and the Ukrainian airliner crash will only “accelerate the protests.”
She said the protesters don’t just include MEK supporters or dissidents but also people involved in the labor movement, environmental activists, and the average Iranian who is discontent with his or her economic situation.
Sepehrrad said he thinks there likely will be more violent suppression before the protests result in a change because the country’s current leadership “understands the only way they can stay in power is through force and suppression.”
“When it comes to the inhumane and brutal nature of this regime, there is no question that this regime only will resort to violence,” she said.
Amiri said he hopes the new wave of protests will end with freedom and democracy for the country he loves. “This regime will go, and we will have a free Iran very soon, hopefully,” he said.
