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Hello, my name is Aaron Reza Merritt.

I'm the author of Terrorists, Cultists, or Champions of Iranian Democracy, the Wild

Wild Story of the MEK, published in The Guardian in 2018.

What fascinated me about this story is how a group, which really was on the cusp of power in the years after the 1979 revolution, became a strange, cultish, irrelevant, highly violent, highly insular group living in a field in Albania of all places. And how they got to Albania was part of the

story I wanted to tell. After they lost the power struggle in the early 80s, the Mujahadine

fought with Saddam Hussein against Iran and really turned themselves in the eyes of many Iranians

into traitors, or as they're called in Iran,

the hypocrites.

And thousands of these Iranian revolutionaries lived in a desert compound in Iraq, where they exhibited

increasingly cultish behavior, including thought control, sexual abuse, meted out by Massoud Rajavi, who disappeared,

his wife, Marion Rajavi, now runs the organisation.

And in the years after 2003, when Saddam fell, they became increasingly under threat by the

Iranians, and the Americans

assisted them in moving to a friendly government in Albania, and there they have been ever since.

I also wanted to tell the story about the Mohammedi family, and they were one of a number of

M.E.K refugees, really, stranded in Albania, and they were one of a number of MEC refugees really stranded in Albania.

And they were trying to get their daughter out of the cult with great difficulty.

What I think's been particularly fascinating about the MAK is they clearly seem to be a source of

funds for US far right politicians, but also guns for hire for the Israelis who have

been waging war covert and overt against the Iranians for decades now.

...