“The people of Iraq stress that the siege of Ashraf should be removed immediately because the residents of the Camp are are refugees and also protected persons according to international laws,” Mashaan Al-Saadi added.
Camp Ashraf, 100 kilometers (60 miles) northeast of Baghdad, is home to 3400 members of Iran’s principal opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) also known as Mujahidin-e Khalq (MEK).
Some 1,000 of the residents are women and one third are former political prisoners in Iran, who survived the Iranian regime’s reign of terror and found safe haven across the border. Hundreds of university graduates from the United States and Europe joined them in the campaign to establish a secular, democratic, and non nuclear republic in Iran.
On April 8, 2011, Iraqi forces, acting at the behest of Tehran, attacked Ashraf, killing 36 and wounding hundreds more. In a similar assault in July 2009, eleven residents were killed.
The Camp has been under complete blockade for the past two and ha half years. A medical blockade has caused lack of access to proper medical services in particular for those who were seriously injured during the raid or suffer from serious ailments. As a result a number of them have died since the raid.
At behest of the mullahs’ regime, the al-Maliki government has installed more than 300 loudspeakers around the camp and conducts a psychological torture against Ashraf residents by continuously broadcasting insults and profanity slurs against the residents.