Yesterday, Politico reported that Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former advisor Newt Gingrich will travel to Paris to speak at a conference of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) tomorrow in Paris.
The MEK are a guerrilla movement fighting first against the Shah and later against the Iranian government, who were exiled first to Iraq and then to Albania. Albania houses 3,000 MEK members.
Since last year, a slew of US politicians have visited the MEK in Albania, often without any public announcement, or under cover of meeting some Albanian politicians. These include former FBI director Louis J. Freeh, US Senator John McCain (who addressed a MEK conference), and a delegation of US Senators Thom Tillis, Roy Blunt, and John Cornyn.
A few months later, US Congressman Ted Poe introduced a bill in the House of Representatives calling upon the government of Iraq “to compensate the former residents of Camp Ashraf [the former MEK camp] for their assets seized by groups affiliated with the Government of Iraq.”
After the resignation of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson earlier this year, MEK leader Maryam Rajavi Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the MEK, released a video on Facebook with following declaration:
Now is the time to expand and spread the bastions of rebellion for freedom. I call on my compatriots across the country to rise up and join this uprising.
The involvement of Giuliani and Gingrich, which follows the unilateral withdrawal of the US from the agreement with the Iranian government, is yet another sign of the increasing political support for regime change in Iran driven by the MEK members exiled in Albania.
