Summary
An exiled Iranian opposition group built on a fusion of Islamic ideology and Marxist revolutionary thought has gained disproportionate visibility and support among Western political elites despite its lack of popularity among Iranians.
Originating as a militant movement that engaged in terrorism and later collaborated with hostile foreign regimes, the group reinvented itself through polished messaging, lobbying, and influence campaigns tailored to Western audiences.
Beneath this rebranding lies a history of cult-like internal practices, authoritarian control, and ideological rigidity.
Western support driven by political convenience rather than ideological scrutiny risks empowering another repressive force in a post-regime Iran, repeating past strategic mistakes.
With Iran’s theocratic regime at the tipping point—economic collapse, mass protests, communication shutdowns, and murderous repression—global discourse now focuses on day-after scenarios and potential successors to the mullahs. Though most Iranians, both within Iran and in the Iranian diaspora, appear to support exiled Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, anti-monarchists have persisted in their campaigns against him online and off. In Los Angeles on January 11, 2026, for example, a man drove a moving truck with anti-monarchy stickers into a demonstrating crowd. Some observers associated the stickers’ slogans with the Islamo-socialist Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK, or, sometimes, MKO) faction. MEK has for decades persisted in its sophisticated advocacy efforts to promote itself as a viable democratic alternative should the Iranian regime fall. Within the scope of those influence operations, MEK has aggressively courted and financially compensated prominent American and European political figures for their support.
What makes MEK’s Western connections especially strange is that MEK is not a conventional Iranian opposition group. MEK, based in a guarded compound in Albania, has become a bizarre cult of Islamic socialism—an apparently odd synthesis of Marxist radicalism with Shiite Twelver Islam. Islamic socialism should not be confused with the political marriage of convenience called the Red-Green Alliance, between Marxists and Islamists, which has resulted in everything from the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran to radical “Free Palestine” protests on American campuses in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre. Islamic socialism is a political hybrid that was born in the Russian communist revolutionary era and whose Leninist influence could be found in the Islamism of Said Qutb, the ideologue of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, or in the novel Shiite works of Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati, the ideologue of the Iranian Islamic revolution.
The intersection of socialism and Islamism is not just theoretical. Figures such as former Women’s March head and Muslim activist Linda Sarsour, the leader of anti-Israel campus and street agitators Nerdeen Kiswani, or the proudly Muslim and Democratic Socialist Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, all demonstrate the reach and “praxis” – practice – of this theoretical hybrid. For the people of Iran, though, Islamic socialism may turn out to be a nightmare scenario, not just a political experiment by New York hipsters. Why has the MEK received support from Westerners, and are they really a threat to Iran?
Historical Trajectory and Ideological Foundations
The MEK was founded in 1965 by leftist students at Tehran University who synthesized Marxist revolutionary ideology with political Islam. The organization’s name—”the People’s Holy Warriors”—reflects a fusion of the Islamic precept of jihad, struggle, connoted as holy war, with Leninism’s armed struggle, and socialist and “ummah” (Islamic collective) populism as one. The MEK was inspired by the Islamic socialist ideologue of the Iranian revolution, Ali Shariati, who purportedly translated Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, a foundational work of the Marxist postcolonial movement, into Farsi.
Though Shariati was neither formally connected to the MEK nor formally encouraged violence, his “Red Shi’ism” fused Shiite martyrology with Marxist class analysis and Fanonian anti-imperialism, creating a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islamic theology that subordinated religious practice to political transformation. The MEK operationalized this theoretical framework through armed resistance, becoming the militant expression of Shariati’s revolutionary vision.
During the 1970s, also the heyday of Palestinian terrorism, the MEK assassinated six Americans in Iran—three U.S. Army officers and three civilian contractors—and supported the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover, where their members chanted “Death to America.” Despite ideological differences, MEK collaborated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement to overthrow the Shah of Iran, believing the alliance to be essential to revolution. Yet, after Khomeini consolidated power, he executed thousands of MEK members, and exiles relocated the organization to France, and then to Iraq in 1986.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the MEK provided Saddam Hussein’s regime with intelligence and military assistance against their homeland, Iran, and helped suppress Shiite and Kurdish uprisings in Iraq. Al Jazeera reported that former MEK member Masoud Banisadr said that members believed Iranians would “welcome us with roses.” Instead, Iranians fled from MEK forces entering Iran, revealing the vast gulf between the organization’s self-conception and Iranian popular sentiment, which persists to the present.
Presentation vs. Reality
After allying with Saddam Hussein, which most Iranians viewed as traitorous, the MEK was forced to reinvent itself. It created a political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella opposition group. An MEK dissident interviewed by The Intercept said that after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, where the MEK was then headquartered, MEK leader Massoud Rajavi said “the old landlord is gone and the new landlord is America” – and therefore the organization would need to pivot its propaganda and influence operations efforts towards America. Similarly, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat found himself persona non grata in the West after standing with Saddam in the Gulf War. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the PLO’s main sponsor, Arafat’s reinvention was also operationalized by second track contacts in Europe that led to Madrid, Oslo, and later American engagement. Hamas similarly reassessed its political warfare trajectory after 2014 and began directing its messages to the West.
Following this pattern, MEK and NCRI began to recalibrate their messaging to appeal to Western audiences: a rejection of clerical rule (velayat-e faqih), democracy rhetoric, the importance of women’s leadership exemplified by Maryam Rajavi, and alignment with human rights and liberal values. Importantly, Maryam Rajavi’s liberal “Ten Point Plan” of 2006, still heavily promoted, also includes the rejection of nuclear weapons. Public-facing MEK representatives spoke fluent English in media interviews and adopted rhetoric palatable to both the Western political left and right. The MEK Ashraf 3 compound in Albania has a media room dedicated to internet influence operations. The NCRI, headquartered in Paris, holds an annual summit meeting, attended by tens of thousands.
In contrast, beneath the MEK’s polished presentation lies an ideological foundation and pattern of behavior that may portend a very different outcome. The MEK’s cult-like behavior has included secretive compound living, forced divorces, enforced celibacy, sterilization and family separation, confiscation of identity documents, systematic isolation, coercion, and allegedly worse.
The MEK lifestyle, as per its dissidents who left its camps, is a window into an authoritarian worldview that may predict any future governance they may offer in Iran. An MEK dissident compared life in the organization’s Iraq compound to the totalitarianism described in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Dissidents have reported on Maoist struggle sessions, brainwashing, and thought control. One dissident reported that in the MEK camp in Iraq, the leadership divided families, sending small children and babies to other countries, so they wouldn’t distract from the work of the members who dedicated themselves to removing the regime. Some female members were subjected to hysterectomies. Married members were forced to give up their wedding rings and their marriage vows in exchange for celibacy. Former leader Massoud Rajavi, the current leader Maryam Rajavi’s husband, who disappeared in 2003, kept a harem of MEK members.
Following Al Qaeda’s attack on New York City’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, Massoud Rajavi gathered members and repeatedly showed them a video clip of the attack, calling it “the greatest news,” as members applauded, a dissident reported.
Contemporary Influence Operations
The MEK launched a calculated lobbying campaign after being removed from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list in 2012 by the Obama administration. MAGA political activist Laura Loomer recently blogged on the scope of MEK influence operations, including hefty speaking fees provided to prominent and respected politicians and former high-level government officials, both Republicans and Democrats.
In addition, the American lobby group, the Iran Policy Committee, whose members are former White House, U.S. State Department, Pentagon, and CIA officials, and scholars from think tanks and academia, has positioned the MEK as the best intelligence source on Iran’s nuclear program. Contrary to this claim, Iran expert Michael Rubin, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, asserts, as do other observers, that MEK intelligence, including its claim to have exposed the regime’s Natanz nuclear facility, may be laundered from foreign sources like Israel or Saudi Arabia for plausible deniability.
Rubin writes that MEK-NCRI and its 40 affiliated American regional front groups (under the umbrella Organization of Iranian American Communities, OIAC) has failed to file IRS Form 990s, mandatory for non-profits with gross receipts over $50,000. OIAC tax forms show income from donations and include expenditures for advertising, office expenses, and travel. Oddly, though, no salaried employees, conference, or meeting expenses are listed. Rubin raises the question: how then do these fronts fund $50,000 honoraria for speeches?
On the other side of the Atlantic, the London Times and Middle East Eye reported that several Members of Parliament – both Conservatives and Labourites – had taken part in NCRI summits. The MEK’s bi-partisan influence is reminiscent to that of Qatar.
Though Western politicians who receive MEK funding may reason that it serves to subvert the Iranian regime, contributing to public consciousness of regime abuses in Iran, Rubin, as do Iranian opposition voices online, argues that MEK’s honoraria actually serve to delegitimize grassroots regime opposition, with most Iranians ardently opposed to MEK.
Policy Implications and Conclusion
If and when the Iranian regime comes to an end, Western policymakers must consider not only the past’s coalitional, operational collaborations with MEK, but more importantly, must assess the likely consequences of supporting them in the future. Khomeini’s Islamic revolution proves that when leftism allies with Islamism, the latter tends to predominate, resulting in jihadism and internal repression in the net total.
Rubin writes that he “once asked a senior American official about why he accepted honoraria from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or the MKO, given the group’s cultlike nature and its lack of popularity inside Iran. His response: Even if the group lied about its support, they said the right things about democracy and regime change, and so he saw no harm in collecting the cash. The regime’s fall, he said, would be a moment of truth: Either the MKO would prove itself right, or its political Ponzi scheme would collapse.”
In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Marxist armed struggle and militant nationalism of the PLO, PFLP, and DFLP expressed themselves in terrorism. Eventually, though, terrorism became the tool of the Islamist Hamas, becoming the most popular movement in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Like MEK, Hamas learned to use the language of “justice” in its 2017 charter appendix, calibrated its language for international consumption, justifying terrorism as “defensive jihad” after October 7. These Muslim Brotherhood tactics have been perfected by Qatar and are distributed by its media empire.
These movements, along with Iran’s current theological and authoritarian regime, all demonstrate that values and ideology—not diplomatic presentation or propaganda—is the best predictor of behavior. The MEK’s fusion of Islamic socialism may prove to be a toxic hybrid of two ideological movements that have produced catastrophic, repressive authoritarian outcomes everywhere implemented. One dissident interviewed by the Intercept commented that when viewing American politicians depict the MEK as “freedom fighters,” he was reminded of how the West unintentionally and indirectly enabled the creation of al Qaeda and ISIS. Another dissident said his lesson to the West regarding MEK would be: “The enemy of my enemy is not my friend – he is my worst nightmare.” If the West is to be involved in Iran’s future transition, it must act as a responsible custodian rather than an enabler of yet another ideologically-powered disaster.
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