TEHRAN, 8 April 2003 — Scores of militants from Iran’s Iraq-based armed opposition have defected and returned home in the face of the US-led onslaught of their Baghdad backers, Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi said yesterday. British and US troops have yet to overrun any of the People’s Mujahedeen’s Iraqi bases, Yunesi said, but Iranian border forces had already received a flood of “repentant” militants from the group which is reviled by both Iran and the Iraqi opposition for fighting alongside the Baghdad regime in the past.
“The return of monafeqeen (hypocrites — the Tehran regime’s standard term of abuse for the group) has accelerated in recent months,” the minister said. “For instance recently around a hundred members of the group handed themselves over to the Islamic Republic authorities.”
Yunesi promised that the regime would not press criminal charges against repentant opposition members, although they would have to respond to any civil suits. They “can enter Iran without fear, but if they have civil cases, they will have to settle them,” he said. The minister said the People’s Mujahedeen had kept up its campaign against the Islamic regime right up to the eve of the war, joining US-led criticism of Iran’s nuclear program.
Mujahedeen members “tried to present false information that Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities were aimed at building atomic weapons,” he said. But he added that Iran had no intention of exploiting the US-led war to attack the opposition group. “They are next door but for certain reasons we don’t want to enter Iraqi soil” to fight with them, he said.
