A recent article gets the measure of one of Iran’s resistance groups all wrong.

As Iran’s streets fill with blood and fire, an essay recently published in The National Interest, titled “What’s Wrong with Iran’s Opposition?” appeared amid one of the most sustained uprisings in the Islamic Republic’s history. For more than three weeks, protests swept over 400 cities and towns.  Thousands of protesters were killed, tens of thousands wounded, and as many as 50,000 detained as the regime deployed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Special anti-riot units, the Basij paramilitary, and plainclothes militias against unarmed civilians. Any serious assessment of Iran’s political future must begin with this reality.

Yet, the article’s core message is unmistakable: that no credible alternative to the ruling system exists, and that realism therefore requires looking inward, to factions within the same theocratic structure, for change.

These claims warrant scrutiny because serious analysis requires distinguishing historical evidence from inherited accusations. By that standard, the article offers less a reassessment than a recycling of narratives shaped by earlier policy assumptions—many of them rooted in failed strategies of engagement with Tehran.

Most notably, the article falsely portrays the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), Iran’s principal organized opposition, as an ideological hybrid of Islamism and Marxism. It also revives long-debunked allegations linking the organization to the killing of US personnel and Pentagon contractors more than half a century ago. These claims are not only entirely unsubstantiated but also irrelevant to any serious assessment of the MEK in 2026.

The assertion that the MEK initiated armed conflict with the clerical regime is false. From the outset, the MEK opposed the regime through political criticism, condemning its undemocratic practices, systematic subjugation of women, and constitution that vested unchecked authority in a so-called “supreme leader.” It did not initiate armed confrontation. To accept this claim is to adopt the regime’s own logic in today’s uprisings: that unarmed protesters somehow “provoked” state violence, and that security forces merely acted in self-defense when they killed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of innocent civilians.

The article’s treatment of the Iran-Iraq War reflects the same flattening of history. The conflict began in September 1980, yet the MEK did not relocate to Iraq until June 1986—four years after Iraqi forces had withdrawn from Iranian territory. By that point, Khomeini had openly proclaimed his ambition to “liberate Quds via Karbala,” deliberately prolonging the conflict. The resulting eight-year carnage was therefore not a “war for national survival,” as the authors contend, but a war sustained by Khomeini to preserve his grip on power. During those years, nearly 400,000 schoolchildren were sent to the front lines, tens of thousands of whom perished in minefields.

Rather than adopting a passive posture of waiting, the MEK launched the most extensive campaign for peace—both inside Iran and internationally—to bring the bloodshed to an end. Ultimately, through the formation of the National Liberation Army and the independent blows it delivered to the regime’s war machine, separate from Iraq, it forced Khomeini, fearing the NLA’s advance, to “drink the poison of the ceasefire,” as he himself later lamented.

Now that decades of disinformation have been stripped away, this is clear to the Iranian people who were the real traitors: those who prolonged a futile war, those who justified it under false pretexts, and those who remained silent, wittingly or unwittingly, about the nearly one million Iranian casualties. By their silence and complicity, they became accomplices in the suffering of the Iranian people.

Beyond these core issues, the article rehearses a familiar set of secondary allegations—claims of cult-like behavior, lack of domestic support, wartime opportunism, and political isolation. These assertions have been examined repeatedly by parliamentary and investigative reports,journalists, and scholars, and debunked by extensive primary documentation. Rather than engaging with this record, the authors dismiss it in passing, treating contested claims as settled fact because the contrary evidence does not fit their narrative.

The MEK has survived four decades of executions, assassinations, imprisonment, exile, blacklisting, and military assault because it has deep roots among the Iranian people. Organizations without roots do not survive such cumulative blows. The more difficult question, rarely confronted by critics, is how a supposedly isolated group continues to function absent state sponsorship.

As for the current uprising, history need not be invoked. The MEK’s Resistance Units have played an active role inside Iran, and many were killed during the protests. One case is illustrative: Naeem Abdollahi, a native of the western city of Kermanshah who held a doctorate in law and political science and served as an assistant professor at the University of Tehran. 

Abdollahi commanded a Resistance Unit detachment operating in Tehran and was killed on January 8 in the Nazi Abad district after leading frontline confrontations with the IRGC and heavily armed anti-riot police forces. His profile, young, highly educated, professionally established, cuts directly against portrayals of the MEK as marginal or socially detached.

Finally, the essay’s fatal flaw lies not in its skepticism but in the policy implications it advances. By dismissing the only organized force the regime itself treats as an existential threat, it implicitly returns to a discredited prescription: waiting for change from within a system that has shown, repeatedly, that it reforms only by killing. It is not merely illusory; it is a glaring and dangerous misdiagnosis.

About the Author: Ali Safavi

Ali Safavi is an official with the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and president of Near East Policy Research (NEPR), a consulting and policy analysis firm in Washington, DC. A sociologist by career, Safavi studied and taught at UCLA, California State University, Los Angeles, and the University of Michigan from 1972 until 1981. Safavi has lectured and written extensively on issues related to Iran, Iraq, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and the political process in the Middle East. Follow him on X: @amsafavi.

Image: Ryan S. Thomas / Shutterstock.com.

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