Yasser Ezati has only just left the Mujahedin Khalq and still has a long way to go. He does not understand it yet, but it will take many years to get the organization out of his system.
‘The hardest thing is to regain your own identity,’ says Massoud Khodabandeh. But former members must also learn how to handle money, how to make even the simplest of decisions, like which shirt to buy. Stepping out of the Mujahedin Khalq is like quitting a heroin habit - it is a complete change of lifestyle. They have lost part of their past, and their comrades are no longer their friends, while new friends are hard to come by when you do not trust people easily.
On the other hand the organization does not leave them in peace, as they are now considered to be enemies. They are called spies by the organization, and sometimes they fall victim to revenge. The most active former members are threatened with violence.
Some turn around completely and now use the emotion they once felt for the Mujahedin against them. Women in Iran, among them Marjan Malek, have formed their own organization, Nejat, that uses more or less the same propaganda methods as the Mujahedin Khalq. They organize bus trips for family members to the last Mujahedin camp in Iraq, to show the members they are still alive and their information is not correct. But for many Nejat is an Iranian government organization and the members are spies.
Chapter 9 Young and easy to recruit
He does not understand how it happened, but it took only a few hours for Yasser Ezati to be talked into joining the Mujahedin army in Iraq, even though he was one of the most critical of the boys in his home in Cologne. Recruitment for the Mujahedin Khalq is carried out in a clever and aggressive way - much like the radical Muslims recruit their new members. This chapter looks at the methods used in groups like the Al-Qaida network, and compares them with the way the Mujahedin Khalq recruits their members.
Teenagers are easy prey. Like Arash Sameti Pour, who at his American computer course fell in love with an Iranian girl who wanted to join the Mujahedin army in Iraq. He went with her, believing he would be fighting to help his people. Even though he knew the situation in Iran was much different from what the Mujahedin told him, it took just six months to indoctrinate him onto wanting to save the Iranian people.
