The regime in Tehran is reeling under a collapsing economy, public anger, systemic corruption, and its inability to resolve Iran’s multiplying crises. International attention is therefore turning toward the decisive internal factor: the Iranian people and organized resistance. Decades of Western engagement failed to moderate the regime, while the wars of 2025 and 2026 showed that military conflict cannot deliver democratic change. Such change can come only through Iranians themselves.
Against this backdrop, Ehsan Mousavi recycles allegations against the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) that have circulated for decades through the propaganda of both the Shah’s secret police and the clerical regime. He treats contested accusations as settled fact, omits decisive chronology, and makes sweeping claims about public opinion while disregarding the democratic program of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, of which the MEK is a member.
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Mousavi’s appeal to what is supposedly “modern” should not be accepted at face value. The social examples on which he relies reveal a narrow, class-coded conception of modernity rather than a political test of democracy. The relevant standards are not conformity to a particular western lifestyle, but commitment to popular sovereignty, political pluralism, equal rights, and the peaceful transfer of power through the ballot box.
The allegations that the MEK was founded to pursue communism and that it was responsible for the killings of U.S. personnel in the 1970s have been examined by independent researchers rather than merely repeated as inherited claims. Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Ambassador Lincoln Bloomfield Jr., among others, reviewed the documentary record and showed how the “Islamic-Marxist” label originated in the Shah’s SAVAK and how later accounts conflated the Muslim MEK with a Marxist splinter faction that killed MEK members as well as Americans. The U.S. State Department’s own 2005 country terrorism report likewise attributed those killings to that splinter faction. Mousavi does not engage this research — he simply reproduces the accusation.
The Iran–Iraq war must begin with the central political fact: After Iraqi forces withdrew from Iranian territory in 1982, the MEK and NCRI pressed for peace, while Khomeini insisted on continuing the war. The NCRI advanced a peace initiative based on the 1975 Algiers Agreement, which won the support of 5,000 lawmakers, officials, and party leaders from 57 countries. Khomeini instead pursued the slogan of “liberating Jerusalem through Karbala,” prolonging a devastating conflict that served the regime’s consolidation of power. The MEK did not relocate to Iraq until 1986, four years after the war’s defensive justification had expired, and reviews of Iraqi archives after 2003 reportedly produced no evidence of operational integration between MEK and Iraqi forces. The essential contrast is therefore between a resistance seeking an end to the war and a theocracy determined to prolong it.
Mousavi’s use of the word “terrorist” also conceals the origin of the designation itself. Senior U.S. officials acknowledged in 1997 that listing the MEK was intended as a political concession or goodwill gesture to Tehran during a period of Western engagement. Once the designation was tested against evidence and law, it repeatedly failed. The UK Court of Appeal described the government’s refusal to delist the organization as “perverse.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit condemned the State Department’s “egregious” delay, and the designation was revoked in 2012 after a 15-year legal and administrative process. An 11-year French investigation treated the relevant conduct within the framework of resistance against tyranny rather than terrorism. Delisting is not political endorsement, but neither can the label’s political origin and legal collapse be honestly erased.
Claims that the MEK has no support inside Iran has no basis in fact. Under a dictatorship, no credible opinion poll can be conducted, and no independent movement can campaign freely, operate national media, hold rallies, or contest elections. The meaningful indicators are the depth, continuity, and cost of resistance. MEK-linked Resistance Units continue to operate inside Iran despite the threat of imprisonment and death. In March and April 2026, nine MEK members were executed, while 13 others, ranging in age from 23 to 68, remained under death sentences. The regime’s prosecutions, execution lists, propaganda campaigns, and persistent diplomatic pressure are not evidence of irrelevance — they show which organized opposition it regards as an existential threat.
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The ultimate test of public support will come after the overthrow of the dictatorship, when all political forces can organize and compete without fear. The MEK and NCRI have explicitly committed themselves to that test. Maryam Rajavi’s 10-Point Plan calls for free elections, political pluralism, freedom of expression and association, separation of religion and state, gender equality, minority rights, abolition of the death penalty, an independent judiciary, a free-market economy, and a non-nuclear Iran. The NCRI proposes elections for a constituent assembly within a maximum of six months after the regime’s overthrow, followed by a constitution submitted to referendum and the dissolution of both the transitional government and the NCRI.
Legitimacy under dictatorship and legitimacy in government are related but distinct. During resistance, legitimacy is earned through sustained opposition to tyranny, democratic conduct, sacrifice, and a credible program for transferring sovereignty to the people. After the dictatorship falls, the authority to govern can come only from free elections. Mousavi cannot credibly declare a verdict on behalf of Iranians while they are denied the freedom to render that verdict themselves.
Ali Safavi, a sociologist by career, is an official with the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). He on X @amsafavi.
