After the 1967 war, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—and particularly Fatah, its largest constituent group—launched a campaign to internationalize the Palestinian cause and position itself as a central node within the global anti-imperialist movement. As Palestinian diplomats worked to bring awareness to the Palestinian cause in settings such as the United Nations, its military training camps emerged as key hubs for armed anti-imperialist organizations. These camps attracted groups from across the globe, from Turkey to Japan to Italy, to undergo political and military training.Footnote 1 These groups sought to learn from Palestinian militants, contribute to the Palestinian struggle, and, later, engage in revolutionary struggle in their own countries.
One such group was the People’s Mujahidin Organization of Iran (MEK), whose roots can be traced to 1965. Inspired by the successes of the Algerian and Cuban revolutions, the MEK advocated for armed resistance against the Iranian monarchy and developed a revolutionary interpretation of Shiʿi Islam. After holding discussions, writing pamphlets, and studying political conditions within Iran during the late 1960s, the group became a key source of opposition to the shah in the 1970s and was at the “forefront of publicity against the Iranian regime,” exposing its cracks (along with the Organization of the Iranian People’s Fadaʾi Guerrillas, or OIPFG) for the first time through its lethal campaign of urban warfare.Footnote 2 By February 1979, when the revolution was on the cusp of victory and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned to Iran, the MEK played a fundamental role in ensuring its success by helping defeat the Imperial Guard of Iran in armed battle.Footnote 3 Within months, however, it broke with the new revolutionary government and became the most important armed opposition to the Islamic Republic.
Before becoming a group capable of armed resistance, the MEK sought practical military training. It turned to the PLO, and in 1970, dispatched twenty members to Fatah military camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.Footnote 4 While abroad, these Iranian fighters learned the principles of guerrilla warfare, carried out their first armed operation (hijacking a plane en route to Iran from Dubai) to prevent their comrades’ extradition, and established ties with revolutionaries from across the Middle East and North Africa. After the initial twenty, dozens more MEK members came to train in Palestinian camps throughout the 1970s, and the group maintained close ties to the PLO through the Iranian Revolution and into the 1980s, when it took up arms against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This article traces the origins of the MEK’s relationship with the PLO by examining the individual trajectories of the militants who first established these ties. I then argue that this relationship reshaped the MEK in multiple ways: influencing its tactics and armed operations inside Iran, incorporating it into a global revolutionary milieu centered on Palestine, and producing various forms of solidarity between the MEK and PLO that persisted both throughout the 1970s and after the Iranian Revolution, when the MEK used its ties to the PLO to challenge the Islamic Republic’s claim to the Palestinian cause.
Because this study centers individual trajectories, it relies primarily on personal accounts, including ten published memoirs, testimonies, and oral history interviews of MEK activists who trained alongside Palestinian revolutionaries. Four of these memoirs have been published within the past five years, offering a newly accessible perspective. Complementing these are archival sources detailing the MEK’s relationship with the Palestinian liberation movement. These include five periodicals (Mujahid, Nashriyyih-yi Khabari-yi Sazman-i Mujahidin-i Khalq, Jangal, Iran al-Jamahir, and Piykar) belonging to the MEK or its successor organizations, and MEK organizational pamphlets. In addition, I conducted three oral history interviews with MEK and OIPFG members who trained in PLO camps, and also reviewed memoirs of Iranian activists from other groups that interacted with the MEK abroad. Although this article illuminates aspects of both the PLO and the MEK, the source material and my approach center the MEK, whose members initiated this relationship and for whom it proved more consequential.
The sections that follow will first address the importance of a transnational approach to the MEK. I then examine how the MEK’s rank and file established ties with Fatah, which led to their military training in PLO camps. The following sections explore MEK’s activities while abroad and assess the broader consequences of this relationship before and after the Iranian Revolution.
A Transnational Approach to the MEK
Evaluating the MEK–PLO relationship, and particularly by foregrounding the individual trajectories of the MEK militants who were at the center of these ties, sheds new light on both organizations. Conventional scholarship, notably Abrahamian’s The Iranian Mojahedin, has provided rich accounts of the MEK and the Iranian guerrilla movement in general but has marginalized their transnational dimensions, reflecting a broader pattern in studies of the Iranian revolutionary movement of privileging its domestic facets.Footnote 5 However, a focus on bottom-up dynamics and the “micro-scale of personal and interpersonal experiences” of Iranians traveling to and training in Palestinian camps complements the existing literature focused on the domestic by revealing how this relationship integrated MEK activists into a broader transnational revolutionary network centered on, but extending beyond, Palestine.Footnote 6 Indeed the Iranian Revolution and other anti-imperialist movements of the era such as the Palestinian liberation movement may appear “irreconcilable on the level of big politics,” the former shaped by Islamist currents, including the MEK, and the latter defined by secular nationalism.Footnote 7 Yet an approach focused on microlevel, transnational dynamics transcends these boundaries and, as Abou-Hodeib and Sohrabi show, reveals the “points of contact and … interaction” between them.Footnote 8
A transnational approach to the MEK also reveals the organizational consequences of its ties to the PLO. The MEK used strategies developed in Palestinian camps, such as a focus on frequent, small-scale attacks, to engage the Iranian monarchy in urban warfare throughout the 1970s. It also received valuable weaponry from the Palestinians. Yet the relationship was not simply one of Palestinian military support for the MEK. MEK members contributed to the Palestinian cause by taking on instructive roles in PLO military camps and using publications to show how the Iranian struggle was intertwined with that of Palestinians. Their ties with Palestinians also served as a springboard for relationships both with other liberation movements and governments—from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman (PFLO) to the governments of Libya and South Yemen—and with other Iranian groups that had ties to the PLO, such as the OIPFG and the revolutionary clergy.
Although it primarily impacted the MEK, the MEK–PLO relationship also sheds light on the PLO’s transnationalism. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, liberation movements across the world, including the Fatah-led PLO, built transnational alliances and solidarities against the common perceived enemies of imperialism and capitalism.Footnote 9 Scholarship has generally emphasized official channels of solidarity: PLO delegations to ideologically aligned states, appeals at the United Nations, and participation in institutions fostered by Global South actors, such as the Tricontinental Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as student organizations like the General Union of Palestinian Students.Footnote 10 Although such avenues enabled many groups to form ties with the PLO, they were not available to the MEK: when it initiated contact, the MEK was operating covertly in a country with no active Palestinian organizations. Instead, this relationship was spearheaded by the group’s rank and file, which had taken the initiative to informally form ties with the PLO. Examining the formation of this relationship therefore compels us to consider grassroots, bottom-up dynamics and individual trajectories as key drivers of meaningful cross-border relationships, offering a new lens through which to evaluate the era’s transnational networks. Such an approach enables a deeper understanding of the PLO’s transnationalism, as it had relationships with multiple clandestine groups in this period beyond the MEK, such as the OIPFG, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and the People’s Liberation Army of Turkey (THKO).
Informal Ties and the Origins of the MEK–PLO Relationship (1965–70)
In September 1965, Muhammad Hanifnezhad, Said Muhsin, and ʿAli Asghar Badiʿzadigan brought together about twenty friends to form what Abrahamian describes as a “secret, well-structured, but as yet unnamed, discussion circle.”Footnote 11 They had been members and supporters of the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI), a religious-nationalist political organization calling for increased freedoms that had been formed in 1961 by Mehdi Bazargan and Ayatollah Mahmud Taliqani.Footnote 12 However, by 1963, as the Iranian monarchy took an authoritarian turn and armed movements worldwide gained momentum, from Algeria to Cuba to Vietnam, younger LMI members like Hanifnezhad, Muhsin, and Badiʿzadigan began to look beyond legal frameworks.Footnote 13
Ideologically, the group sought to synthesize the “religious values of Islam with the scientific thought of Marxism” to combat imperialism and capitalism, as epitomized by the shah.Footnote 14 They spent the first few years reading and discussing religious and revolutionary texts, studying the conditions of Iran, and theoretically learning about armed resistance. By 1969, they decided to contact regional revolutionary forces for military training.Footnote 15 As they were interested in the Palestinian movement, they chose to first contact the PLO. This section sheds light on the contingent, informal, and individual-level dynamics that brought the relationship into being.
The formation of this relationship did not initially go as planned: the group sent one of its leaders, Husayn Ruhani, to the PLO office in Paris to inquire about military training. Mahmud al-Hamshari, the head of the office, wanted to ensure that Ruhani and his group were legitimate by speaking to his contacts in the Iranian student community in Paris. Ruhani rejected this idea: because the group was operating clandestinely, it was unknown to the broader Iranian student community at the time, and therefore al-Hamshari’s contacts would not have known of Ruhani. Ruhani further maintained that exposing his own identity to al-Hamshari’s Iranian contacts would have created security risks for his group.Footnote 16
After Ruhani’s failed mission, another member of the group, Fathullah Khaminahʾi, took matters into his own hands and pursued contact with the PLO through unofficial channels. Khaminahʾi set out for Dubai in mid-1969, hoping to reach the PLO’s offices in the Persian Gulf countries.Footnote 17 Turab Haqqshinas, a member of the group’s Central Committee, recalled that this trip did not have formal organizational approval.Footnote 18
With no contacts of his own, Khaminahʾi reached out to a friend of his brother, who had previously spent time in Dubai, and stayed at his home for the night. This friend’s roommate told Khaminahʾi that he had an acquaintance in the PLO office in Doha.Footnote 19 He wrote Khaminahʾi a letter of introduction and Khaminahʾi went to Doha to contact the PLO representative there. At the PLO office in Doha, Khaminahʾi was redirected to Fatah’s office. Over two days, Khaminahʾi and Said al-Mishal, Fatah’s representative in Doha, spoke about protest movements in Iran and the shah’s secret police (SAVAK), until Khaminahʾi said that his organization was actively fighting the shah and sought Fatah’s help. Al-Mishal told Khaminahʾi to send an official negotiating team to Doha.Footnote 20
Khaminahʾi returned to Tehran, and the organization’s Central Committee decided to continue with the negotiations, taking up what began as Khaminahʾi’s side project. In March/April 1970 (Farvardin 1349), three members—Khaminahʾi, Haqqshinas, and Rasul Mishkinfam—were smuggled into Doha where they met two Fatah officials, al-Mishal and Abu Ismaʿil.Footnote 21 They explained their ideology and organizational structure, criticized the shah’s destructive role in the Middle East, and advocated for Arab–Iranian solidarity before requesting military training. Over the following weeks, talks continued and, unbeknownst to the Iranians, Fatah monitored their movements.Footnote 22 After two months, the Fatah representatives, confident in the group’s intentions, provided the Iranians with an address in Beirut where the final negotiations would take place.
Back in Tehran, the group assembled a team to travel to Beirut. Then, in the summer of 1970, several members of the organization traveled to Dubai to obtain fake passports to facilitate travel within the region. At the time, the Iranian government offered temporary consular services in various cities throughout the Gulf, including issuing passports to anyone presenting a birth certificate (shināsnāmih). By using forged birth certificates, the activists could acquire real passports under false identities, allowing them to move freely across the region.
At this point, a five-person team was chosen to negotiate with Fatah: Haqqshinas, Khaminahʾi, and Masʿud Rajavi, along with Badiʿzadigan and ʿAli Bihpur.Footnote 23 Khaminahʾi notes, however, that he himself did not take part in the negotiations and was in Beirut to coordinate the arrivals of other members.Footnote 24
The negotiators went to Fatah’s Beirut office and were then sent by car to Fatah’s Amman office. There, they presented their views on various political issues.Footnote 25 After a few days, they were introduced to Abu Hasan, Fatah’s head of intelligence in Amman, who dealt with foreign groups seeking military training and worked under Abu Iyad, Fatah’s second most senior official. After a few sessions, Abu Hasan told them, “We recognize you as a revolutionary organization and are willing to cooperate with you and provide for your needs… . Wherever in the world you are, we will provide you with arms.”Footnote 26 The time had come for the Iranian delegation to begin military training. They informed their comrades waiting in Dubai and began bringing them over.
The inception of the relationship between this group of activists—which would later officially be called the MEK—and Fatah was therefore not the result of any high-level diplomatic transnationalism. Rather, it was the product of a genuinely bottom-up, improvised grassroots initiative, one marked by chance and informal connections, which differed from the PLO’s “diplomatic operations” in places such as Geneva, New York, and major Arab capitals, and also is absent from traditional accounts of the MEK’s transnationalism.Footnote 27 Unable to forge ties through leadership-level diplomacy (as illustrated by Ruhani’s failed mission to Paris) and lacking institutional avenues for engagement with the Palestinians, the group’s rank and file successfully took on the responsibility of establishing a relationship with the PLO.
The PLO’s Initial Military Support for the MEK (1970–71)
The MEK and PLO deepened their ties over the following year, during which the PLO provided military training to twenty MEK members. Tracing the cross-border trajectories of individual MEK members, this section shows how their ties with the PLO enabled them to carry out their first attack, shaped the tactics that the organization later used in its guerrilla campaign inside Iran, and gave them access to weapons they could smuggle into the country.
After the negotiations, MEK members began making their way to Fatah’s Hasan Salamah military base, eight kilometers outside Amman.Footnote 28 The group trained under an Algerian commander known by his nom de guerre, Ahmad al-Jazaʾiri (Ahmad the Algerian).Footnote 29 Their daily schedule included morning exercise and combat drills, along with weapons training and instruction in military tactics.Footnote 30 According to Haqqshinas, the program offered a brief but adequate introduction to the fundamentals of guerrilla warfare.Footnote 31
After fifteen days, however, Black September began, during which the Jordanian Armed Forces killed thousands of PLO guerrillas (fedayeen) and Palestinian civilians. Because the fedayeen had established Jordan as a base from which to launch attacks against Israel, King Hussein faced pressure from both Israel, which carried out strikes on Jordanian territory, and his own military, which sought to bring the fedayeen under control.Footnote 32 After tensions rose, King Hussein formed a military government and demanded that the PLO disarm; in response, the PLO called for overthrow of the monarchy. On 17 September 1970, the Jordanian army began attacking PLO bases near Amman, including Hasan Salamah. Fatah decided that it was unsafe for foreign fighters to remain at the base and escorted the Iranians back to Beirut to wait to be transferred to another camp. Black September eventually ended fedayeen activities in Jordan and forced the PLO to relocate its primary base of resistance to Lebanon.Footnote 33
Before the retreat, however, the Iranian team received alarming news: six members who had been in Dubai en route to the training camp—Mahmud Shamikhi, Muhsin Nijat Husayni, Husayn Khushru, Kazim Shafiʿiha, Musa Khiabani, and Jalal Sayyid Ahmadian—had been arrested. They were preparing to fly to Beirut but were detained in Dubai after their disheveled appearance drew police suspicion while they were shopping for new clothes.Footnote 34 Their Iranian-born interrogator extracted the address of their residence, where authorities found forged passports and a book of revolutionary Arabic hymns.Footnote 35 When news of their arrest reached the Hasan Salamah base, Mishkinfam and Khaminahʾi paused their training and went to Dubai to evaluate the situation.Footnote 36
While imprisoned, the activists communicated with their comrades in both Tehran and Dubai by sending letters with an Iranian inmate, named Habib, who left the prison each day for forced labor.Footnote 37 Once the situation became clear, a three-person team comprising Ruhani, Mishkinfam, and Muhammad Sadiq Sadat Darbandi was formed to devise an escape plan.
While the communication channel with the prisoners was active, Fatah also attempted to help them. For example, they sent a letter signed by Arafat addressed to the Palestinian judge overseeing the case, which Rajavi personally delivered.Footnote 38 Khaminahʾi and Mishkinfam, meanwhile, remained in contact with a Fatah representative who was in direct communication with the judge. This is indicative of the PLO’s strategy during this era: It sought to support revolutionary movements in any way, beyond military training, as it viewed Palestine as one of many interconnected arenas of global revolutionary struggle.Footnote 39
On Wednesday, 4 November 1970, the prisoners, accused of being a passport-forging ring, learned that they were scheduled for extradition on the next flight from Dubai to Bandar Abbas the following Monday.Footnote 40 Frantically, the prisoners gave Habib letters to deposit at the drop site hoping that the team would receive them, even though their letters were usually delivered on Tuesdays. Finally, on Sunday, 8 November, after the Palestinian judge informed Fatah’s representative that something suspicious was happening with the Iranian prisoners, Mishkinfam rushed to the drop site.Footnote 41 There, he found four letters explaining the situation, just twenty hours before the scheduled flight to Bandar Abbas. Without Mishkinfam’s relationship with Fatah’s representative, it is likely that he would not have been alerted in time.
The rescue team got to work. Two months prior, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had carried out a series of highly publicized airplane hijackings aimed at both securing the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel and Europe and resisting the Rogers Plan, an American initiative that aimed to push Arab countries toward recognition of Israel.Footnote 42 Although the hijackings resulted in the suspension of PFLP membership in the PLO’s Central Committee and in the heightening tensions that culminated in Black September, retrospective accounts indicate that the Iranian activists were directly inspired by them.Footnote 43
Although the group had previously emphasized its desire to begin armed operations with a large, coordinated attack inside Iran, they were forced into action earlier than expected. To hijack the plane taking their comrades to Bandar Abbas, the team purchased three tickets for the flight and concealed the necessary materials in their luggage: two small firearms, gasoline and homemade napalm (which they hid in juice cans), five switchblades, a compass, and a large map of the Middle East.Footnote 44 The next day, they went to the airport and boarded the flight.
Less than ten minutes after takeoff, the flight attendant began distributing breakfast, and the operation commenced. Two of the hijackers overpowered the unarmed police officers, while the third subdued the flight attendant. They freed their six comrades, distributed switchblades, and tied up the officers. The hijackers then entered the cockpit, ordered the pilot to fly to Iraq, and used their compass and map to ensure he was obeying instructions.Footnote 45
At the time, Iran–Iraq relations were particularly hostile. In 1969, the shah had abrogated a 1937 treaty that functionally gave Iraq control over the Shatt al-Arab waterway.Footnote 46 That same year, the Iranian government was implicated in an “aborted coup attempt” against the Iraqi government and provided support to Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.Footnote 47 The Iraqi government, meanwhile, hosted members of the Iranian opposition, the National Front of Iran, Middle East Branch (NFME), in Baghdad, allowing them to engage in propaganda against the shah.Footnote 48 In an environment of increased tensions between the two countries, the hijackers believed that landing in Iraq would enable them to avoid extradition.Footnote 49
After arriving in Baghdad, the Iranians were questioned by several individuals, among them members of the NFME. Because this group could not confirm the identities of the hijackers, the Iraqis feared that the hijacking was a SAVAK ploy, and consequently imprisoned and tortured them.Footnote 50 In Tehran, the Central Committee attempted to intervene by leveraging its connections to LMI leader Ayatollah Taliqani, persuading him to request the intercession of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was based in Najaf at the time. Khomeini, however, declined to act, claiming that his intervention would only make things worse or lead the Iraqis to begin asking him for favors.Footnote 51
Next, the comrades in Beirut asked Fatah for help, and Haqqshinas traveled to Baghdad to meet with Abu Nidal, Fatah’s representative in Iraq.Footnote 52 Together, they arranged a meeting with Iraqi officials, who permitted them to visit the prisoners. Haqqshinas also provided the Iraqis with an account of the organization’s political objectives and expressed its commitment to participating in the Palestinian struggle.Footnote 53 With Fatah’s support, the Iraqi authorities were convinced of the group’s legitimacy, and the prisoners were released.
Meanwhile, a number of additional comrades had joined the team in Beirut: Ibrahim Avakh, Nabi Muʿazzami, Riza Dadizadih, and Muhammad Yaqini.Footnote 54 After four months in Beirut, the group secured a new site for military training in January 1971: Fatah’s Shaykh Zannad base in Tripoli, Lebanon. The nine prisoners and Haqqshinas eventually arrived at the camp, where they joined the daily routine of early morning runs, calisthenics, combat training, and guard duty.
After a few weeks at the Shaykh Zannad base, the group relocated to another Fatah base in Tartus, Syria, where they remained from January to April 1971.Footnote 55 In addition to combat drills such as judo, karate, and shooting, they learned about manufacturing homemade bombs and grenades. The training program also included grueling physical conditioning, from forty-kilometer night marches in full combat gear to jumping exercises during which commanders fired live bullets at the activists’ legs, which even resulted in an MEK member being shot.Footnote 56 Tensions rose at times between the Palestinians and the Iranians: if the latter did not perform a drill to the Palestinians’ satisfaction, they were punished by having to jump into the Mediterranean fully clothed and were even disarmed once after disagreeing with their trainers’ methods.Footnote 57
Nonetheless, in April 1971, the Palestinian commanders deemed the Iranians physically, mentally, and strategically ready to launch a guerrilla warfare campaign in Iran. They traveled back to Beirut to prepare their return to Iran. Fatah provided them with weapons, which they concealed in their suitcases as they reentered Iran, some coming by plane and others via the Turkish border.Footnote 58
With the arrival of the first returnees, the group believed that it was ready to begin attacks in a way that was tactically informed by Fatah’s instruction. Prior to their training in the camps, the group had sought to conduct a coordinated, nationwide attack on police and military sites, similar to the 1 November 1954 operation of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN).Footnote 59 However, during their time with Fatah, they held long debates with Abu Hasan, who pushed them to start with small-scale operations.Footnote 60 This Fatah-informed shift is clear from an MEK pamphlet, which shows that the most important tactical change in the organization by mid-1971 when compared to 1969/early 1970 was that they “must begin with small-scale operations, not an armed urban uprising.”Footnote 61
Having alleviated their lack of practical training, obtained weapons from Fatah, and even carried out a successful hijacking, the group that returned from Beirut had an “exaggerated sense of confidence.”Footnote 62 For example, Rajavi, Bazargani, and Mishkinfam pressured the Central Committee to launch operations as soon as possible.Footnote 63 This eagerness to strike, only compounded by the fact that the OIPFG had launched its first attack in February 1971, led the group to become lax in security practices.Footnote 64 In August/September 1971, before the group had conducted any attacks inside of Iran, SAVAK discovered the organization’s network of safehouses and arrested hundreds of its members.
A few returnees from Lebanon who had not been arrested, such as Badiʿzadigan and Mishkinfam, continued to push Fatah’s line and insisted that small-scale armed operations be carried out in an effort to free those who had been imprisoned.Footnote 65 Muhammad Hanifnezhad, a Central Committee member who had not undergone training with the PLO, was “opposed to such hasty and reactionary operations” and continued to prefer the Algerian model, but Badiʿzadigan and Mishkinfam prevailed.Footnote 66 Eventually, Riza Rizaʾi, who also had trained with the PLO, became the organization’s leader and implemented Fatah’s model. After the organization announced its existence as the Mujahidin-i Khalq-i Iran (People’s Mujahidin Organization of Iran) in February 1972—a decision taken by three members based in Beirut and approved by Rizaʾi in Tehran—they conducted a barrage of attacks.Footnote 67 In May 1972, the MEK bombed a British Overseas Airways corporation office, a police station in downtown Tehran, and the editorial offices of a journal they accused of “propagating cultural imperialism.”Footnote 68 A few weeks later, during US President Richard Nixon’s visit to Iran, they conducted another series of bombings, targeting Reza Shah’s mausoleum, the offices of Pepsi Cola and General Motors, and the Intercontinental Hotel, among others, while also attempting an assassination of Harold Price, the head US general in Iran.Footnote 69 In solidarity with the PLO, the group even bombed the Jordanian embassy to protest the visit of King Hussein.Footnote 70 The weapons that the MEK obtained from Fatah were vital to these attacks, with Nijat Husayni stating, “The only weapons in our comrades’ hands in Iran [at that time] were those few we had smuggled from abroad by concealing them.”Footnote 71
Taken together, the MEK’s relationship with Fatah proved vital in the initial stages of its campaign of armed struggle, by both determining how the organization would tactically begin conducting attacks in Iran and providing the weaponry to do so.
Mutual Aid, Global Solidarity, and Ideological Splits (1971–79)
The initial relationship between the MEK and Fatah centered on military training and weapons. Yet as the MEK’s relationship with the PLO continued into the 1970s, these ties took on greater dimensions. The second phase of the MEK–PLO relationship, from 1971 to 1979, was characterized by three new developments. First, a sense of mutual solidarity between individual Fatah and MEK members, grounded in Fatah’s military aid, extended to other forms of practical cooperation. In addition, MEK members used Fatah’s global network as a gateway to integrate into a regional community of liberation movements, leading them to form ties with Iranian and non-Iranian liberation groups. And finally, an MEK ideological split pushed most members toward a secular model of liberation more aligned with that of the Palestinian movement.
Although most MEK members sought to return to Iran after their training, some were forced to stay in Lebanon, and during that time they further developed their ties with the PLO. Muhsin Nijat Husayni and Muhammad Yaqini, for example, were arrested at the Beirut International Airport in July 1971, as they were discovered by airport security with concealed weapons.Footnote 72 The two were threatened with deportation to Iran. After MEK members alerted Fatah, the latter worked with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) to secure the commitment of a handful of lawyers to defend Nijat Husayni and Yaqini. The legal team created Fatah identification cards for the two men and presented them as Fatah members before the court. The lawyers then argued against attempts to extradite them to Iran, maintaining that transferring individuals carrying official identification from a PLO organization would violate existing agreements between the PLO and the Lebanese government.Footnote 73 The two were not deported, signaling a victory for the PLO’s legal strategy.
Later, when Nijat Husayni found himself in Lebanese prison once again, along with his comrade Turab Haqqshinas, this time for carrying forged passports, Fatah sprang into action and provided legal counsel for the two. Upon hearing that their prosecutor was Druze, Fatah even contacted Kamal Jumblatt, the leader of the Druze community, who successfully pressured the prosecutor to drop the charges, leading to their release.Footnote 74 In total, Fatah helped at least five MEK members escape imprisonment and avoid deportation to Iran, demonstrating that the relationship between the two organizations had expanded to include forms of cooperation that went beyond military training and weapons.
Even back in the military camps, where their relationship first developed, the dynamics of Fatah’s relationship with the MEK changed. Fatah no longer acted simply as the MEK’s instructors; rather, there was a greater sense of reciprocity. For instance, after his release from prison, Nijat Husayni, a chemical engineer by training, was sent to a Fatah camp in southern Lebanon in 1974. For four months, his responsibilities revolved around teaching new Fatah recruits how to make homemade explosives out of readily available supplies—mainly in the broken Arabic he had learned in prison.Footnote 75 In his case, the Fatah–MEK military relationship was reversed: one of Fatah’s former Iranian trainees became an instructor. In Damascus, Nijat Husayni also worked in a Fatah laboratory that manufactured munitions, weapons, and other war necessities. There, working alongside his Palestinian comrades, he helped produce grenades and small arms to be used by both Iranian and Palestinian fighters.Footnote 76
The MEK also used Fatah’s connections to the Iraqi government to access PLO camps in the Iraqi city of Hit. As in the Levant, their training in Iraq included shooting, assembling firearms, and making explosives, in addition to other, more advanced training, such as anti-aircraft drills. Some MEK members in Hit became fixed presences, moving beyond the role of mere trainees to instead conduct experiments in the camp’s explosives laboratory and, in the case of Arabic speakers like Mujtaba Taliqani, to liaise between new Iranian arrivals and the camp’s Palestinian leadership.Footnote 77
Taliqani’s role extended beyond coordinating ties between MEK members and Fatah. Seminary students from Khomeini’s circle in Najaf also came to the Hit camp. Taliqani recalls that Turab Haqqshinas, himself a former clerical student, introduced young seminarians sympathetic to the MEK’s vision of liberation theology to Abu Nidal so that they could receive armed training.Footnote 78 The MEK, therefore, served as an early bridge between Fatah and the Khomeinist camp, and Taliqani, whose father was among Iran’s best-known revolutionary clerics, remembers training with a handful of these seminarians in Hit.Footnote 79 Other seminarians trained alongside Iranian guerrillas stationed in Syria as well, among them Abbas Aqazamani, a future founder of the postrevolutionary Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) who used his connections with Taliqani to facilitate his travel to the Arab world.Footnote 80 Ties between these clerical networks and Fatah would endure into the Lebanese Civil War, when Fatah received several Iranian Islamist volunteers.Footnote 81
The MEK’s early ties to the clerical opposition point to a larger dynamic: their integration into a wider community of Iranian revolutionaries. Because Palestine was the epicenter of the global liberation struggle in the 1970s, different factions within the Iranian opposition sought relations with the PLO. This included not only the MEK and Khomeini-aligned seminarians, but also the OIPFG, Iran’s Marxist guerrillas.Footnote 82 Whereas the MEK and OIPFG both viewed the PLO as their most important ally, the OIPFG’s ties were generally with the PLO’s left wing, primarily the PFLP and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command (PF-GC), as recent scholarship on the OIPFG has shown.Footnote 83 Nonetheless, the two Iranian groups’ overlapping connections with the PLO created important channels of cooperation between OIPFG and MEK militants.
For example, through the PLO, the Iraqi government contacted the MEK, suggesting they broadcast a radio program promoting their political program from Baghdad.Footnote 84 The Iraqi government then extended a similar invitation to the OIPFG. As a result, from 1972 to 1975 the MEK and OIPFG worked together to broadcast a daily radio program from Baghdad, one that served to increase recruitment for both organizations and help inform their audience about the Iranian guerrilla movement.Footnote 85
Later, through their contacts with the PLO in Beirut, both the MEK and OIPFG established ties with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman (PFLO), which was in the midst of an insurgency against Oman’s Iran-backed Sultan Qaboos.Footnote 86 In addition to sending their members to fight alongside the insurgents, the MEK and OIPFG worked together to bring attention to the PFLO’s liberation struggle, as seen in a joint statement they issued condemning the shah, Qaboos, and Israel, in which they linked their own shared struggle in Iran to those of the PFLO and the Palestinian people.Footnote 87
The Palestinians continued to introduce their Iranian interlocutors to other foreign forces. For example, Fatah’s Abu Jihad wrote Haqqshinas a letter of introduction to the Libyan government, which sought to present itself as a champion of global liberation movements. The PLO similarly introduced the OIPFG to Libya, enabling both Iranian groups to establish bases in Tripoli.Footnote 88 Through a similar process, both groups formed ties with the government of South Yemen and opened bases in Aden. These bases and connections with foreign governments were vital, providing the groups access to monetary support, bank accounts, arms, unlimited travel (via Libya’s national carrier), and a permanent address, which enabled them to retain contact with their supporters.Footnote 89 But they also became sites of unprecedented organizational collaboration between the OIPFG and MEK. In talks with the governments of Libya and South Yemen, for example, the two organizations presented themselves as a unified Iranian front, negotiating with these states through “joint committees” to give the impression of a cohesive Iranian liberation struggle.Footnote 90
As the MEK developed these extensive transnational relationships, an ideological shift was taking place within the organization. Beginning in 1974, many MEK members concluded that the group’s Islamic socialist ideology was contradictory and abandoned Islam in favor of Marxism. This ideological split led the “Marxist” MEK and “Muslim” MEK to operate as separate organizations. The Muslim MEK survived primarily in prisons and was not a significant force until the revolution; the Marxist MEK, however, remained incredibly active inside and outside the country, maintaining the organization’s relationship with the PLO and other liberation movements.Footnote 91 This Marxist faction initially continued to operate as the MEK but, in December 1978, took on the name Piykar.
From 1974 to 1975, MEK members abroad increasingly gravitated toward the Marxist branch, a shift that some members linked to their interactions with PLO members who regularly expressed their negative views of religion to them.Footnote 92 For example, in its obituary of Murtiza Khamushi, a member with extensive ties to the PLO, the Marxist MEK stated that his study of the Palestinian revolution’s “rich experiences” had prepared him to “welcome Marxism-Leninism” as the organization’s guiding ideology.Footnote 93 In this account, Khamushi’s ties with Palestinians played a role in his ideological shift away from Islam and toward a more secular model of liberation. Although it is impossible to establish whether ties to the Palestinian movement caused this ideological shift among other members, it is telling that the MEK’s entire branch abroad, which was in constant contact with the PLO, embraced the shift.
In addition to the internal ideological conflict, the MEK faced armed conflict at one of their main bases with the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. The initial stages of the war pitted the PLO and its leftist allies against Christian militias such as the Israel-backed Kataʾib Party. Seeing their allies facing a growing military challenge, the MEK sought to further affirm its solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. The MEK’s Persian-language publications already regularly addressed Palestine, but in 1976 they created an Arabic-language publication, Iran al-Jamahir (Iran of the Masses) to show how the Iranian struggle was intertwined with that of other “progressive and revolutionary” movements in the region, primarily Palestine.Footnote 94 In Iran al-Jamahir, which addressed members of Arab liberation movements, the MEK argued that the enemies of the Palestinian cause and the enemies of their struggle in Iran were one. For example, they cited the “close ties” between the shah and Israel, in addition to stating that, “The Iranian regime provided the fascist Kataʾib in Lebanon with unlimited financial support … Camille Chamoun and Pierre Gemayel had maintained very close ties with the political-police circles in Iran.”Footnote 95
By foregrounding the shah’s ties to Israel and to Lebanese Christian militias opposed to the PLO, the MEK cast him as an active participant in the Lebanese Civil War, on the side of the Palestinian liberation movement’s enemies. The implication was clear: if the forces aligned against them—from the Lebanese right to Israel to the shah—were acting in concert, then revolutionary forces had to do the same. The MEK continued producing Iran al-Jamahir until the Iranian Revolution, portraying the Palestinian struggle in Lebanon as another front—alongside Iran, Oman, and Palestine itself—in the war against imperialism, Zionism, and reactionary regimes in the region.
Overall, during the 1970s, the MEK maintained close ties with the PLO. In doing so, it expanded not only the forms through which it expressed its solidarity but also its relations with other revolutionary groups, both Iranian and non-Iranian. Until the 1979 revolution, the MEK’s transnational connections reshaped its members’ conceptions of their own movement, leading them to view their struggle as intertwined with the Palestinian cause and embedded within a broader global movement. Nijat Husayni described being struck by the feeling that they were at the “dawn of a transformative social movement” led by the Palestinians.Footnote 96 Others conveyed the “unforgettable memories” and camaraderie felt with the Palestinians and the emotions of seeing volunteers from all over the world seeking to “fight for a better future for humankind.”Footnote 97
The MEK-PLO Relationship After the Iranian Revolution
In 1978, mass protests shook Iran, drawing in broad segments of Iranian society, including young people mobilized by the MEK and OIPFG’s guerrilla campaigns. Throughout 1978, the release of political prisoners gave new life to the Muslim MEK, as many of its leaders were released, including some, like Rajavi and Musa Khiabani, who had studied with the PLO. In February 1979, the MEK and other armed groups engaged the shah’s Imperial Guard in armed conflict and, later, broke into the government’s arms depots to seize weapons and help secure the success of the revolution.Footnote 98 At this point, members of the Marxist MEK, now called Piykar, who were abroad came back to the country.
The revolution had implications for both Piykar’s and the Muslim MEK’s relations with the PLO. Piykar abandoned armed struggle and went on a publishing blitz advocating for the creation of a working-class party.Footnote 99 As they sought to create a mass organization within the country, ties with Palestine and foreign groups become less important, even though Piykar members had been the ones maintaining the MEK’s transnational relations on the eve of the revolution. Piykar did, however, continue to support the Palestinian struggle in its publications.Footnote 100
The Muslim MEK developed more extensive ties to the Palestinian liberation movement after the revolution, yet the nature of the relationship changed. Pre-1979, the relationship was centered on clandestine solidarity with the MEK as a military organization. After 1979, as the MEK operated openly, its ties to and discourse around the PLO and the Palestinian movement served first as evidence of its revolutionary credentials and later, as the MEK’s relationship with the new Islamic Republic soured, as a way to delegitimize the new government.
This shift from a clandestine to open relationship began in February 1979, when PLO leader Yasser Arafat visited Iran.Footnote 101 Arafat was welcomed warmly by Khomeini, and a statement on state radio spoke of the “special position” the PLO occupied for Iranian revolutionaries.Footnote 102 Arafat did not only see Khomeini on that trip; he also met MEK leader Masʿud Rajavi and praised the MEK in a press conference.Footnote 103 Given the popularity of the Palestinian liberation movement in Iran at the time, the Rajavi–Arafat meeting and the latter’s praise enabled the MEK to project itself as a leading revolutionary organization in Iran.
After that visit, rifts started to open between the MEK and the Islamic Republic, and Palestine became a site of contestation between the two and, later, a tool that could be used by the MEK to criticize Khomeini. In April 1979, an MEK sympathizer was arrested, and the organization complained to Khomeini about the government’s antidemocratic tendencies.Footnote 104 Later, the MEK challenged the Islamic Republic’s lack of monetary and military support to the PLO and also printed in Mujahid a letter from the PLO inviting MEK leaders to visit them in Lebanon.Footnote 105 These actions enabled the MEK to present itself as more genuinely and legitimately committed to the Palestinian cause than the Islamic Republic. Finally, in early December 1979, the MEK openly defied Khomeini by refusing to participate in the referendum to ratify the constitution.
The MEK–Islamic Republic rift was mirrored by a growing conflict between the PLO and the Islamic Republic, despite initial friendly ties. On 4 November 1979, Iranian students loyal to Khomeini occupied the American embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage. The PLO saw an opportunity to use what it perceived as good relations with the Islamic Republic to mediate. Yet a PLO delegation sent to Iran to do so was rebuffed: the Iranian state did not want to negotiate and was heavily critical of the PLO’s diplomatic maneuvers.Footnote 106
In light of Khomeini’s cold reception of the PLO, the MEK began further strengthening and publicizing its own ties to the organization. On 18 February 1980, the MEK published a special edition of Mujahid publicizing Yasser Arafat’s second visit to Iran. Arafat and Rajavi held a meeting on this trip in which Rajavi gifted Arafat a machine gun, symbolically stating that it was the “Palestinian revolution that first put arms in the hands of the MEK” and that MEK members “still consider [themselves] as students of Palestinian camps.”Footnote 107 Mujahid also reprinted messages sent by other PLO factions congratulating the MEK on its role in the revolution, while also publishing articles on the Palestinian struggle more broadly, including a piece that presented Zionism as a new form of imperialism.Footnote 108 With this coverage, the MEK sought to bolster its revolutionary credentials, casting itself as a longtime ally of the Palestinian movement, and implicitly positioning itself rather than the Khomeinists as the true inheritor of the revolution’s internationalist and anti-imperialist commitments.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic clamped down on the MEK. In early June 1981, MEK demonstrations were banned by Iran’s chief prosecutor. The MEK confronted this ban and, on 20 June 1981, organized large demonstrations and announced the beginning of armed resistance against the new regime.Footnote 109 This conflict led to unprecedented executions of MEK members, the MEK’s bombing of government buildings, assassinations of top government officials, and intense street fighting. The MEK became the primary armed opposition to the Islamic Republic, and Rajavi fled to Paris to direct the organization from abroad.Footnote 110
With the MEK’s return to armed struggle, MEK–PLO relations remained important, and Rajavi used these ties to directly attack Khomeini and the Islamic Republic by casting their purported support for the Palestinian cause as disingenuous. From his Parisian exile, Rajavi publicized his meetings with Palestinian officials, most notably Hani al-Hasan, one of Arafat’s close advisers and former PLO ambassador in Tehran.Footnote 111 At the same time, the MEK published pieces showing that the Islamic Republic had bought arms from and had commercial ties to Israel.Footnote 112 In doing so, the MEK adopted a discourse similar to its prerevolutionary rhetoric, in which it portrayed the shah and Israel as united against Palestinians. It now applied that same logic to the Islamic Republic, accusing it of “weakening and plotting against the Palestinian revolution and particularly its leaders.”Footnote 113 With this, the MEK represented its struggle against the Islamic Republic and the Palestinian struggle against Israel as intertwined. The MEK further mentioned Khomeini’s verbal attacks on the PLO, using them as a segue to stating that Khomeini was illegitimate in the eyes of the Palestinian leadership:
Perhaps we can see why one of the Palestinian leaders, Hani al-Hasan, sent a telegram of congratulations to Masʿud Rajavi for his arrival in Paris… . This shows that the PLO recognizes well who the real friends of the Palestinians are in Iran and through which channel the Revolution passes.Footnote 114
At the same time, Khomeini went on an offensive against the PLO. Following Iraq’s invasion of Iran and the PLO’s initial policy of not seeking to alienate either country, Khomeini heavily criticized the “Palestinian leadership.”Footnote 115 The PLO then declared support for Iraq in the war, with Arafat “publicly supporting Iraq’s ‘just’ struggle to defend its sovereignty.”Footnote 116 Seeking a state ally in its struggle against the Islamic Republic, the MEK also sided with Iraq, and Rajavi held meetings with both Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq Tariq Aziz and Saddam Hussein.Footnote 117 Throughout this period, the MEK retained warm ties with Arafat and the PLO, as evidenced by a 2 July 1986 meeting between Arafat and Rajavi in Baghdad, during which the two leaders “condemned the Khomeini regime.”Footnote 118 By this point, the MEK was backed by the Iraqi government and no longer depended on the PLO for material assistance as it did before the revolution. In this way, its relationship with the PLO became diplomatic and symbolic, a way to signal its continued commitment to the Palestinian cause and present itself as a more legitimate revolutionary force than the Islamic Republic.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic also sought to portray itself as a defender of the Palestinian cause. But given the friction with the PLO, it was in search of other allies. Khomeini did not view the Palestinian struggle through the lens of national liberation and instead emphasized its Islamic nature.Footnote 119 Some of the Islamic Republic’s leaders in the early 1980s collaborated with Lebanese clerics and militants to sponsor ideologically aligned organizations, such as the Association of Muslim ʿUlamaʾ in Lebanon (AMUL) and, later, Hizbullah, which both mobilized against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.Footnote 120 Unlike the PLO, these organizations were largely in line with Khomeinist thought. In the late 1980s, the Islamic Republic similarly began supporting Islamist Palestinian alternatives to the PLO, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), whose founder had written a text in praise of Khomeini, and, later, particularly in the early 1990s, Hamas.Footnote 121
For its part, the MEK continued to be based in Iraq under Baʿthist sponsorship until Saddam Hussein’s overthrow in 2003. After the Iran–Iraq War, however, its relationship with the PLO diminished in importance. In the 1990s, the MEK underwent an ideological reversal, abandoning its earlier revolutionary idealism in an effort to curry favor with powerful states opposed to the Islamic Republic. Despite its pro-Palestine origins and close ties to the PLO during the 1970s and 1980s, the MEK began developing links with Israeli intelligence in the 1990s and especially after 2003, because its struggle against the Islamic Republic intersected with Israeli strategic goals.Footnote 122 As the MEK pivoted toward Israel—the very state it had once denounced as central to the imperial world order it opposed—Palestine ceased to occupy the same place in the organization’s revolutionary imagination. And as this revolutionary imagination gave way to political opportunism, the material and personal ties between the MEK and PLO waned, before disappearing altogether.
Conclusion
Using a variety of sources, from oral history interviews to memoirs to organizational publications, this article has traced the relationship between the PLO and MEK from the contingent encounters that led to MEK’s inception to the trajectories of the militants that underwent military training in PLO camps. It has shown the consequences of this relationship before the Iranian Revolution, when it played a key role in MEK members’ initial conceptions of armed struggle and enabled them to become part and parcel of a global community of revolutionary movements centered on Palestine, and after the revolution, when this clandestine relationship became open and quasi-diplomatic, before dissipating after the Iran–Iraq War.
In addition to shedding new light on the MEK, this article lays the groundwork for future scholarship to expand understandings of the PLO’s political relationships in the region and world. These ties reveal a form of transnationalism rooted in covert training and personal bonds of solidarity, through which the PLO helped position Palestine as an epicenter of global liberation. Indeed, the article’s focus on the consequences of informal ties and individual trajectories offers a starting point for future research into the processes through which the PLO formed relationships with other clandestine organizations. This includes groups such as the OIPFG, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and the People’s Liberation Army of Turkey, among others like the Japanese Red Army, all of which maintained a clandestine presence in Palestinian camps. Beyond showing how these transnational ties were formed, this approach additionally sheds light on broader dynamics, such as how individuals’ interpersonal relationships can both impact organizational trajectories and translate solidarity into durable forms of cross-border collaboration.
Finally, the MEK–PLO relationship also offers insight into the ongoing US–Israeli war against Iran. Although the MEK broke with the Islamic Republic, this study has shown its initial ties to both clerical revolutionaries and early IRGC leaders, such as Abbas Aqazamani, through their shared time in PLO camps. From its inception, the IRGC’s war tactics—such as asymmetric attacks and the use of small units to put pressure on more powerful enemies—echo the lessons taught by the PLO.Footnote 123 For instance, IRGC commander Hossein Salami, invoking Vietnam as a model, emphasized the need to confront superior enemies through smaller and decentralized forms of attack, principles that were central to the training that Palestinians provided Iranian revolutionaries in the 1970s.Footnote 124 In this sense, Iran’s ability to impose costs on the United States, Israel, and their allies through these unconventional means can be traced in part to the guerrilla tactics circulating through these transnational revolutionary spaces—spaces that the early leaders of postrevolutionary Iran shared with groups like the MEK.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Maryam Alemzadeh for reading previous versions of this piece and giving me constructive feedback. Thank you to Zahra Javidi at Oxford’s Middle East Centre for helping me access many of the archival documents needed for this piece. This work is dedicated to my parents, Sara and Said.
Competing Interests
The author declares none.
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