22 exiled dissidents in Iraq "asking to return to Iran"

Aug 1, 2009, 12:32 GMT

Baghdad - Twenty-two members of an Iraq-based Iranian opposition group have asked to return to Iran after Iraqi security forces took control of their base, an Iraqi news agency reported Saturday.

The request came after clashes when Iraqi security forces tried to enter the People's Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI) base at Camp Ashraf in Iraq leaving - according to the PMOI - seven dead and scores wounded.

'Twenty-two persons have submitted requests to concerned authorities in the Ministry of Interior, asking to return to Iran,' General Abdel-Karim Khalaf - head of the Iraqi Interior Ministry's National Command Centre - told Baghdad's Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

Iran has offered members of the PMOI an amnesty provided they sever their ties with the group and cease activities on its behalf. Hundreds of members have reportedly taken the Iranian government up on its offer.

In 2005, the New York-based pressure group Human Rights Watch reported that former PMOI members now in Europe had said the group was preventing others from leaving, and was abusing dissident members in its internal prisons.

The PMOI countered that Human Rights Watch's sources had been recruited by Iran's intelligence service, a charge the organisation denied.

The PMOI, also known as the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, was founded in 1965 to oppose the government of the shah. In 1981 it started an armed campaign

Iran and the United States list the PMOI as a terrorist group. Iran blames the group for several high-profile political assassinations.

After the group was expelled from France in 1986, Iraq's then- president, Saddam Hussein, allocated it a military base near the border with Iran.

Iran has said that before Saddam was ousted, the PMOI frequently infiltrated its territory, leading to clashes and casualties on both sides.

After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US military disarmed the group and was responsible for protecting it in the face of sectarian violence throughout Iraq. In the summer of 2008, that responsibility was handed over to the Iraqi army.