Iranians hate the Mojahedin-e Khalq not only because it is a corrupt cult that helped bring Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power, but also because of their subsequent behavior as mercenaries for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
As Khomeini turned on his former supporters, purged them, and, in many cases, executed them, the Mojahedin rank-and-file defected to Saddam’s Iraq. There, they integrated into Saddam’s Republican Guards, attacking not only Iranian forces against the backdrop of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, but also Iraqi Kurds and those who revolted against Saddam’s tyranny in 1991. Today, Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, known in Arabic as the Hashd al Shaabi, follow the Mojahedin-e Khalq’s trajectory.
Word leaking from inside Iran suggests a massacre has taken place as the Islamic Republic tries desperately to restore its control. Because Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei does not fully trust his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to follow his orders and murder protesters that might include family members, school classmates, and veterans, he appears to have subcontracted to the Hashd al Shaabi to restore order.
That he must subcontract to Iraqis to do his dirty work is telling. Not only can he not trust the Revolutionary Guards, but the Hashd al Shaabi’s involvement is also reflective of the fact that Iraqi dinar salaries matter. While Iraq’s economy has recovered and is even thriving 23 years after Saddam’s ouster, Iran’s economy has collapsed over the same period.
Khamenei’s use of the Hashd al Shaabi should be a wake-up call to American policymakers for several different reasons.
First, it shows just how illegitimate Khamenei is in his people’s eyes. He founded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as his trusted Praetorian Guard against both the Iranian army and the insufficient revolutionary fervor of the people. Today, even many of the guardsmen no longer believe in the Islamic Republic. Those who still do must rely on the barrel of a gun rather than on the legitimacy of ideas.
Second, it reinforces just how disingenuous the idea in some quarters is that the Shi’ite militias in Iraq are legitimate. While Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on Iraqi Shi’ites to band together to fight the Islamic state, those Iraqi militias now fighting in Iran predate his call but try to derive legitimacy from it. For decades, State Department and intelligence community Middle East specialists swore Hezbollah had evolved to become a Lebanese nationalist organization and that Washington should no longer dismiss them as Iranian proxies. They were wrong, as Hezbollah’s deployment to prop up former Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s regime showed. The Hashd al Shaabi are no different today. President Donald Trump should react. If Iraqi Badr Corps members kill Iranians, Badr Corps head Hadi al Amiri should be held accountable, even if it means targeting him in his Baghdad home.
Third, American politicians who believe the Mujahedin-e Khalq rhetoric that they represent the aspirations of the Iranian people should understand why both Iraqis and Iranians hate them so much. The atrocities they committed on behalf of Saddam are akin to what the Hashd al Shaabi perpetrate on behalf of Khamenei.
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Crises bring clarity. When the smoke clears, Iran will never be the same.
Neither should U.S. policy. Much like the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the Hashd al Shaabi have shown themselves to be little more than mercenaries for hire. To allow their survival is to risk the stability of all freedom-seekers across the Middle East. It is time to target any Iraqi militiaman who seeks to profit from murder in Iran, just as it would be right to target any Iranian who now or in the past sought to profit from murder in Iraq.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.