[News] Tank girls: the frontline feminists

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Tank girls: the frontline feminists

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=596433&host=3&dir=75


These women have come from around the world to bring down Iran's 
ayatollahs. So why were they bombed by the West? Christine Aziz visits 
their desert HQ




28 December 2004

As the coalition bombs hit the flat salt plains on the north-eastern border 
of Iraq, members of a little known, female-led Iranian army huddled in a 
bunker. While the earth shook, showering dust on their neatly pressed khaki 
headscarves, 25-year old Laleh Tarighi and her fellow combatants tried to 
protect themselves.

Eighteen months later, recalling the terror of being attacked by British 
and US bombers during the invasion of Iraq last year, Tarighi, a former 
pupil of Parkside and Hill Road School in Cambridge, says: "We were puzzled 
more than afraid. We knew our officers had sent messages to the Pentagon 
insisting that we were neutral and shouldn't be attacked. We were only in 
Iraq to overthrow the Islamic fundamentalist regime across the border in Iran."

It is hard to imagine that Tarighi was once a typical British teenager who 
loved going to the cinema and socialising in cafés. Few of her friends knew 
that when she was a child in Iran, her father had been executed for being a 
member of the Iranian resistance, and that her mother was a high-ranking 
commander in the National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA). After A-levels, 
Tarighi had planned to study media at university, but then, aged 18, she 
decided to leave the comfort of the home she shared with her aunt to join 
her mother in the NLA in a military camp on the Iran-Iraq border.

The NLA is the military wing of the National Council of the Resistance of 
Iran (NCRI), a female-dominated, Iranian parliament-in-exile whose aim is 
to topple the Islamic fundamentalist regime and replace it with a secular, 
democratic government. The NCRI is led by a charismatic Iranian, Maryam 
Rajavi, 53. Security around her is tight for fear of assassination 
attempts, and she very rarely appears in public. Her organisation has kept 
a low profile until it recently started sharing intelligence reports on 
Iran's nuclear programme with America and Europe.

But, in spite of this co-operation, the NLA is still considered a terrorist 
organisation by the West. The coalition forces in Iraq have restricted its 
3,800 combatants to their camps, and their weapons have been confiscated. 
Women make up 30 per cent of the NLA, but 70 per cent of the officers are 
female. The British Army has just one female brigadier, while in the Navy 
there are four female captains.

Rajavi has long encouraged female participation in the army. She argues 
that, as misogyny is the mainstay of the Iranian government, who better to 
strike at it than women? Her female recruits, many of whom had been 
tortured and imprisoned in Iran, train alongside men in all aspects of 
frontline battle, including hand-to-hand combat and armoured vehicle 
operation. With the backing of wealthy Iranian exiles, they are preparing 
for the day when the order comes to march east over the frontier to 
liberate their land from the mullahs.

Tarighi is one of hundreds of sons and daughters of Iranian exiles in 
Europe, America and Canada who have volunteered to join the army since its 
inception in 1987, when Saddam Hussein allowed the NLA to build its camps 
along the Iranian border. Until Saddam's fall in March last year, the NLA 
had been able to build up its military force under the watchful eye of its 
host.

When Tarighi arrived in Iraq in 1997, she was still sporting a stud in her 
tongue and wearing trainers - very different to the army's uniform for 
women of khaki headscarves, combat trouser-suits and boots. It was not her 
first visit to the NLA camp at Ashraf; when her mother fled with her 
daughter in 1987, they escaped to this camp, where they lived for four years.

The Gulf War in 1991 meant that all the camp's children were evacuated to 
foster-carers in the West. "I grew up in Cambridge from the age of 10. My 
life was pretty much there," Tarighi says. "After I passed my A-levels, I 
decided to spend a gap year in France before going off to university.

"But I got news that my mother had sent me a letter, care of the NCRI 
headquarters in Paris. It was the first letter I'd received in a long time, 
and it was very affectionate. I talked to NCRI members and decided to go 
and join my mother. We hadn't seen each other for eight years. I knew her 
immediately I saw her, but she didn't recognise me. I looked like any other 
British girl, and she wasn't too pleased about my tongue stud.

"At first it was difficult living back in the camp, and I missed a lot of 
things, especially, believe it or not, the English weather. I love rain, 
and there wasn't a lot of it in Iraq. But it was the friends I made in the 
camp, and the support and encouragement I received, that carried me 
through. I did marching drills and learnt to fire a Kalashnikov. I had 
never seen a gun in England. I didn't join the NLA for my mother, but for 
Iran. The regime murdered my father, and my grandmother had been in prison 
there many times. Resistance is in my blood."

Ashraf is 14 square miles of impeccable tidiness. The first impression is 
of a holiday camp rather than a military base. Eucalyptus trees line long 
driveways, men and women tend gardens, and there's the smell of bread from 
the bakery. Since Tarighi arrived at the camp in 1997, a swimming pool and 
an exhibition room have been built.

But in that time the cemetery, decorated with plastic flowers, has 
expanded. In the past 18 months, 40 soldiers have been killed in coalition 
attacks and, after these assaults, by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who then 
found it easier to slip across into Iraq. The NLA tanks and artillery that 
once patrolled and guarded the base have disappeared; in their place, 
American military police guard the entry checkpoint with tanks and patrol 
the base in armoured Humvees.

The growing danger meant that Tarighi left the camp soon after the bombing. 
Now she works in NCRI offices around Europe, still hankering for her army 
life. But another British girl, Sharobeh Barooti, 19, stayed on. She is one 
of several hundred combatants with European passports or residency rights 
who remain at Ashraf. Born in France, Barooti is an only child whose 
parents are in the Iranian resistance. She doesn't know where they are, 
although she receives occasional letters.

Barooti moved to the UK in 1991 to live with an aunt and uncle, but by the 
time she was 15, at Edgware High School in north London, she knew she 
wanted to join the NLA. "I had heard a lot about the Iranian regime from my 
aunt and uncle, and I began to feel I should do something. I went to the 
NCRI office in London and told them I wanted to join. They gave me 
information and arranged for my travel to Baghdad." She dropped out of her 
GCSE studies and travelled to Iraq, where she was met by officials of the 
People's Mojahideen of Iran (PMoI) - the most significant group within the 
NCRI - and escorted to Ashraf camp.

Sitting in the camp's library, she recalls that her friends thought she was 
mad. "After all, families are not torn apart in Britain, people aren't 
tortured, and women can achieve anything," she says. "In Iran, women's 
lives are limited and they are punished for the smallest things.

"When I arrived here, it was the hardest thing to obey different rules. It 
was so different from my life in London. For a year, I thought about the 
future I could have had in Britain and compared it to my future here. I had 
thought about travelling the world and opening an art gallery."

Several weeks after the fall of Saddam, the US General Ray Odierno of the 
4th Infantry division entered Ashraf camp to negotiate the disarming of the 
NLA. He found himself in a room lined with cream Regency furniture and 
Persian rugs, drinking coffee from white and gold china cups and eating 
homemade sweetmeats with a group of female army commanders considered to be 
terrorists by his government.

In 1997, President Bill Clinton had declared the PMoI and NLA to be 
terrorist organisations, as a goodwill gesture towards Iran's newly elected 
President Mohammed Khatami. Recently, the NLA's potential to be used as a 
bargaining chip by Washington has been noted as tensions rise over Tehran's 
meddling in Iraq. But on his visit the US general, clearly impressed, said 
that he thought the terrorist status of the NLA combatants should be reviewed.

The disarmed NLA keeps up its training on computers, and the US military 
police in the camp are their sole protection against attacks by the 
Tehran-backed groups now moving freely around Iraq. "If the Americans don't 
protect them, there will be a bloodbath," says Capt Ismael Ibrahim of the 
Iraqi National Gathering party.

Only in July, when the NLA came under the protection of the Fourth Geneva 
Convention (relating to the protection of civilians in wartime), did its 
members feel safer. They no longer face the possibility of being handed 
over to Tehran by America in exchange for high-ranking al-Qa'ida members. 
As Captain Ibrahim says: "I think in a few years the US may think of doing 
to Iran what they have done to Afghanistan and Iraq, and will try to use 
the PMoI and NLA."

This is not what the resistance likes to hear, but in the long term this 
thinking could help the NLA and PMoI lose their terrorist tags. In May 
2000, Britain included the PMoI in a list of 21 terrorist organisations 
under the Terrorism Act. A year later, the European Union added the PMoI to 
its list.

Mojgan Parsai, the secretary general of the PMoI, said in October: "From 
the outset, the terror label on the PMoI lacked a legal basis. We are 
blacklisted in the framework of commercial and political deals with 
Tehran." Her comments came as France, Germany and Britain were reported to 
have promised Iran that if steps were taken to halt work on completing its 
nuclear fuel cycle, the European side would continue to regard the PMoI as 
a terrorist organisation.

At a conference of human-rights lawyers in Paris last month, Bill Bowring, 
professor of human rights and international law at London Metropolitan 
University, said: "Under the definition of the Terrorism Act, Greenpeace 
and Amnesty International should be on the terrorist list. It was a 
completely arbitrary decision to include the PMoI on the list."

Also at the conference was the Danish human-rights lawyer, Anne Land. 
Earlier this year, she visited Ashraf camp. She is aware that the NCRI is 
accused by its critics of being a cult, and that some consider both the 
NCRI and the NLA to be militarily and politically ineffective.

"The real importance of this army has been overlooked," she says. "In Iraq, 
many women were able to go to school and university, to work and to wear 
what they wanted. Now, they are being intimidated in the streets for not 
covering their bodies, or for just being outside their homes. Groups of men 
strongly influenced by Iranian fundamentalists, who are apparently 
supporting some political and religious groups in Iraq, are making their 
lives miserable.

"The presence of a female-dominated army prepared to fight the mullahs and 
Iran's Revolutionary Guards is a powerful symbol to all women in the 
region. Its effectiveness is not in its military might. The fact that the 
army exists at all is a huge threat to all male-dominated fundamentalist 
regimes. It shows what women can do.

"The women in Ashraf say they don't want to leave until they have 
overthrown the regime in Iran. Unfortunately, they don't see their courage 
as having a wider, inspiring influence beyond Iran," Land says.

It was the treatment of women in Iran that moved Barooti and Tarighi to 
join the NLA. "My aunt used to tell me how Revolutionary Guards would stop 
women in the streets and wipe off their lipstick with the blade of a 
knife," Barooti says.

Tarighi says she cannot forget the harrowing pictures of a young woman her 
own age buried to her neck and stoned to death by a crowd. She asks: "Why 
am I a terrorist because I fight for my sisters' rights?"


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