NCRI – This morning, the Iranian regime’s terrorists blew up a passenger bus that was carrying a number of Iraqi workers to Ashraf City, home to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran. The terrorist attack, carried out three kilometers north of the Iraqi town of Khalis, left 13 dead and 15 wounded, some in critical condition.
This terrorist and cowardly attack against defenseless Iraqi workers who have been working in Ashraf City for many years was carried out just one day after the mullahs’ Foreign Minister had visited Iraq. Directional and high-explosive bombs built by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were used in the attack.
The religious, terrorist dictatorship ruling Iran which views the PMOI’s presence in Iraq as a major bulwark against its export of fundamentalism and terrorism as well as its attempts to install a puppet regime in that country, has embarked on an extensive campaign to force the extradition or the expulsion of the Mojahedin from Iraq.
In August 2005, the mullahs’ mercenaries in the Iraqi Minister of Interior, abducted two PMOI members, Mohammad Ali Zahedi and Hossein Pouyan in Baghdad’s Karada Street and took them to the Interior Ministry and then to an unknown location. Several other attempts by the mullahs’ operatives to kidnap the Mojahedin have also been neutralized. Since last year, through its proxies in the Iraqi government, the clerical regime cut fuel, water and electricity rations for Ashraf City.
PMOI’s passenger buses have been attacked repeatedly in the past. On June 9, 1999, a Mojahedin bus was targeted near a hospital north of Baghdad on the same route. Six were killed and 21 wounded in that attack. The next day, Ashraf was hit with Scud missiles.
In late April 2006, in an official memorandum by their ambassador in Baghdad to Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the mullahs voiced protest over the extensive support by Iraqi personalities, parties, tribes, sheikhs and citizens for the Mojahedin and demanded that the PMOI and Iraqi citizens be deprived of their right to free speech.
A large segment of Iraqi society and political circles in that country as well as political and parliamentary circles in Europe and the United States condemned the mullahs’ actions and underscored the rights of the PMOI personnel in Ashraf City as protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Now that all these conspiracies and schemes have proven futile, the mullahs have perpetrated a new scale of crimes, for which they had prepared the grounds in pro-regime Iraqi dailies many weeks ago, by threatening the Mojahedin with "retribution."
PMOI’s Secretary General Ms. Sediqeh Hosseini called on the United Nations and the Multi-National Force – Iraq to condemn this crime and make public without any reservation the names of those who ordered and carried out this crime. She also called for urgent action by the United Nations Security Council to stop the mullahs’ unbridled terrorism against innocent Iraqi citizens and Iranian political refugees in Ashraf City.
Ms. Hosseini added, "As a majority of the Iraqi people has demanded through their slogan ‘expel Iran from Iraq,’ in order to secure calm and security in Iraq, there is no other way other than to cutting the tentacles of the mullahs’ criminal regime in Iraq and to expel their operatives from that country."
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
May 29, 2006
