CAMP ASHRAF, Iraq — Residents of this sprawling commune an hour north of Baghdad pride themselves on their self-sufficiency. They bake their own bread, purify their own water, even make their own carbonated cola.
They spend their days tending to their gardens, sprucing up their living quarters and listening to performances of John Lennon's "Imagine." And they conduct military drills while they wait for their chance to overthrow the Iranian government.
"This is heaven," Abdel Reza "Joe" Jowkar said, gesturing around a landscaped park complete with artificial waterfall.
"I'm close to the [Iranian] border, I'm ready. I'm a warrior, ready to do battle," said Jowkar, an Iranian-born 57-year-old who attended Cal Poly Pomona in the 1970s. "I'm having fun with my friends and looking to the future."
This is Camp Ashraf, home to the Mujahedin Khalq: the people's holy warriors.
The MEK, as the group is known, is one of the stranger byproducts in the U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. When American forces overthrew Hussein's regime, they inherited this 4,000-strong group of Iranian dissidents that the dictator allowed to set up shop here in the mid-1980s.
With enough firepower for a mechanized brigade and an emphasis on self-reliance, celibacy, feminism and fervor, the MEK was a kind of Shaker army of the Iraqi flatlands. The Americans took away their weapons, threw a fence around Camp Ashraf and placed them in "protective custody."
Two years later, nobody -- not even the members -- seems quite sure what to do with the MEK, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Many members say they want to stay put and continue the fight, even without weapons. But the future Iraqi government, sure to be stocked with pro-Iranian leaders, may want to kick them out.
Going home isn't an option. Allied with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1979 Iranian revolution, the MEK soon fell out with the Islamists and went into hiding, hounded by Iranian intelligence officials. The U.S. branded it a terrorist organization in the 1990s, in effect shutting down the group's thriving American lobbying and fund-raising machine and complicating any efforts to find a third-country home.
Now its members are in political limbo, orphans of modern Middle Eastern geopolitics.
