Iran’s MEK plots a US-backed path to power from exile in Albania

(Elis Gjevori – Middle East Eye) The war on Iran has given an opposition group that has long struggled for relevance in exile a chance to grab the mantle of history and present itself as a ready-made alternative to the Islamic Republic. As Israel and the US began to strike Iran on 28 February, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) swung into action. Maryam Rajavi, the group’s 72-year-old leader, announced the formation of what she described as a provisional government tasked with overseeing the fall of the Iranian regime and its replacement with a democratic republic with her at the helm. For more than a decade, 3,000 members of the MEK have lived in a small village outside Albania’s capital Tirana, turning the Balkan country into an unlikely outpost of a distant conflict. The group, founded as an Islamist-Marxist student militia in the 1960s, relocated to the village of Manze in 2013 when Albania agreed, at Washington’s request, to accept fighters previously based in Iraq. – Iran’s MEK plots a US-backed path to power from exile in Albania | Middle East Eye