TEHRAN – Chief of Staff of Iran's Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Bagheri has said Monafiqeen were crushed during Operation Mersad due to God’s grace and sacrifices made by Iranian people’s youths.
General Bagheri made the remarks at a ceremony to mark the 31st anniversary of Operation Mersad, 26–30 July 1988, which was the last major military operation of the Iran–Iraq War, involving a successful counterattack against a July 1988 military incursion from Iraq, by a military force of about 7,000 members of the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), who are known in Iran as Monafiqeen (hypocrites).
He commemorated the fallen soldiers who lost their lives for the Iranian people during Iraq’s war against Iran as well as Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the U.S. earlier this year.
The general noted that Operation Mersad showed the Iranian people’s awareness and cleverness in the face of the enemies’ plots.
The MEK was established in the 1960s to express a mixture of Marxism and Islamism. It launched bombing campaigns against the Shah, continuing after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, against the Islamic Republic. Iran accuses the group of being responsible for 17,000 deaths.
Based in Iraq at the time, MEK members were armed and equipped by Iraq to fight against Iran alongside the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during a war which lasted for 8 years.
The MEK’s affiliation to the U.S. government attracted attention in 2012 when the latter removed the former from its list of foreign terrorist organizations.
The link became more overt after U.S. President Donald Trump assumed office in 2017. Trump’s associates, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his national security advisor John Bolton, have attended the MEK’s meetings and praised the cult group as “democratic alternative” to the Islamic Republic.
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