Majid Rafizadeh: Resistance’s Advances on World Stage, at Home Terrifies Tehran Regime

Every summer, the organized Iranian resistance movement has held its annual gathering to showcase a better future for Iran and to tell Western governments to end their appeasement of Tehran, and to side with the Iranian people for a free, secular, pluralistic, democratic, and non-nuclear Iran, living in harmony and cooperation with its neighbors and the free world. 

The huge in-person rally, Free Iran World Summit 2022, was scheduled to convene in Ashraf 3 in Albania, home to principal opposition the MEK, on July 23 and 24. As hundreds of world dignitaries supporting the Iranian Resistance against religious dictatorship were arriving in Albania, US and Albanian authorities warned of a credible terrorist threat to the event venue targeting the MEK leadership. 

The week before, Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Task Force (Albanian SAPO) busted a network of Iranian regime agents and infiltrators, actively surveilling and preparing for terrorist attacks on the Iranian Resistance. Members of the terrorist ring have been detained, their digital devices confiscated and searched, and all were put under official investigation for their actions. 

Around the same time, the Iranian Foreign Ministry published on July 16, a list of 61 current and former American officials who it said have provided “deliberate support” for the MEK. In addition to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, California Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, and Sen. Cory A. Booker, New Jersey Democrat, were among current officials sanctioned by Tehran on Saturday. 

This was not the first brazen attempt at terrorist attack on Iranian dissidents in Europe. In 2018, the regime used an active diplomat in charge of its intelligence operations against dissidents in Europe to transfer an explosive device on a passenger plane from Tehran to Vienna and to transfer the device to the diplomat’s accomplices to bomb the Free Iran Summit in Villepinte France. Assadaollah Assadi, was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for this potentially lethal terrorist attack by a Beligan court and is now the subject of a shameful treaty to release Assadi, between Belgium and Iran’s hostage-taking regime.

The Iranian regime has actively used its diplomatic presence in European countries to plot terrorist bomb and assassination attacks against Iranian dissidents in Europe for decades. It is simultaneously illegally detaining Western citizens and dual citizens as a form of hostage-taking in a mafia-like bid to extort concessions from weak European governments like Belgium and to force them to free its captured diplomat terrorists, and to impede the Iranian resistance and check the opposition’s political and diplomatic inroads in Europe. 

Two successive visits by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the 48th Vice-President of the United States, Mike Pence, in May and June of this year, to meet with Maryam Rajavi at Ashraf 3, Albania, are indicative of the pressure that Tehran feels as it faces immense unrest in Iran fueled by the MEK’s resistance units. These events are not happening in a vacuum. They coincide with dueling visits to the region by President Biden to acknowledge the geopolitical reality of regional opposition to the current Iranian regime’s ambitions to dominate the region, and President Putin’s visit to enhance his alliance with the rulers in Tehran against any change to the status quo. 

But change is inevitable as events in Iran and the region likely show. President Biden’s earnest efforts to revive a dying agreement over Iran’s nuclear weapons program (JCPOA) since coming to the White House have been met with a change of tactics in Tehran and the resulting intransigence and running of the clock that has led even the most ardent advocates of the deal to admit the JCPOA is likely dead. As the US and Europe grapple with the reality that Tehran has always sought a bomb and that appeasement has never worked, new global geopolitical imperatives are added reasons to seek change in Iran. 

The Iranian people though are not waiting for outside actors and the Iranian Resistance has actively organized a nationwide network of resistance units to protest and revolt against the regime’s tyranny and its violent suppression of the Iranian people’s rights and the plunder of their national wealth for use in proxy wars and nuclear weapons development. 

As social protests take root in Iranian cities and towns across the nation, and as resistance units challenge the regime’s authority at every chance, in the marketplace, in universities, in offices, schools, and factories, as well as in cyberspace, the regime becomes ever more desperate to strike at the oppositional group as the engine of resistance and political alternative to its religious fascism.

In another defeat for the Iranian regime, one of the regime’s accessories to mass murder and the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran, and an aide to now regime president, Ebrahim Raisi, who himself is implicated as a member of the death committee in 1988, was convicted by a Swedish court exercising universal jurisdiction, and sentenced to life in prison for his crimes. 

As the curtain on the Iranian regime’s atrocities is slowly pulled back, and as its agents are ensnared in the European justice system, it has become virulently aggressive in political blackmail and organizing terrorist attacks against the Iranian Resistance movement. Even more reason for the world to notice and step up in its support for fundamental change in Iran for the better.

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