INTERVIEW
YORKSHIRE POST - Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
My years of slavery
Anne Singleton grew up in an unremarkable Yorkshire family, but by her early
20s she was a member of a terrorist organisation recruiting suicide bombers in
Iraq.
IN 1992, Anne Singleton was in the Iraqi desert being trained
to fire a Kalashnikov rifle by the People's Mujahedin of Iran. It was a year
after the first Gulf War and Anne was a member of an organisation intent on
overthrowing the Iranian government by force.
"I was in the desert wearing a military uniform and I had no passport and no
money," she says. "I had never felt so free in my life. But the irony was that
I was in a state of modern slavery. I was mentally chained to the Mujahedin."
Sitting in her Leeds home 15 years later, the 48-year-old wants to make her
past public in the hope it acts as a stark warning that recruitment to an
organisation proscribed as a terrorist movement by the European Union, America
and Canada, is something that could happen to anyone.
In the present climate, with radical terrorist cells and cults active in the
UK, Anne is campaigning to raise awareness of how extremist groups manipulate
people.
Her life now, living in a three-bedroom semi as a computer programmer and
being a mother to a six-year-old-son, could not be further removed from a
previous existence where she prepared for war and accepted the deaths of
innocent people as a justifiable means to an end.
"I thought I was a saviour of the world and would have done anything for the
Mujahedin. I worshipped those people," says Anne, whose involvement with
fanatical extremists began when she moved from Yorkshire to study English at
Manchester University.
Her boyfriend at that time, an Iranian called Ali, was interested in the
Mujahedin, and Anne became intrigued by the movement's opposition to the
regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution.
"Manchester Uni was very political and I went along to Mujahedin meetings,"
she says. "In truth, I could not even understand what the leader was saying in
the videos but I was utterly transfixed."
The Mujahedin was formed in 1965 to free Iran from "capitalism, imperialism,
reactionary Islamic forces and despotism" and by the early 1970s, it had
embarked on an armed struggle and later sought refuge in Iraq, fighting with
Saddam Hussein against the Iranian government.
Anne's indoctrination, conversion and submission to the organisation was
something that happened gradually over a period of about 10 years, the subtle
influence of Anne's Mujahedin peers eventually leading her away from her job,
friends and family.
She views the Mujahedin now as a cult and says their methods of psychological
manipulation are tried and tested and used by many other groups around the
world, even similar to some tactics employed by salesmen to sell timeshares.
"It takes a long time and they are very clever and use peer pressure," she
says. "They implement subliminal messages. They use mind control techniques.
They got me to submit to a higher order, their leader.
"They got me to make financial commitments. I used to ask all my friends and
family to donate money to various causes that were all blatant lies.
"They replace your family, your relationships and get you to reject all your
old values."
In 1985, Massoud Rajavi became the Mujahedin leader, transforming the
movement, Anne says, from a being a political group into a cult.
He married a woman called Maryam, whose role was to encourage women to break
away from male control, and Anne began spending all of her spare time looking
after members' children, cooking, listening to their poetry and revolutionary
music.
"I thought they were people of a higher order," says Anne, who was utterly
convinced she was part of a noble, armed struggle. She even had posters of
martyrs, suicide bombers and women with guns adorning her walls.
In 1989, Anne split with Ali, who wanted nothing more to do with the movement,
and she moved to London to become more involved in Mujahedin activities.
During this period, she got involved with activists at a safe house in
Finchley and, when the UN Human Rights Rapporteur visited Iran in l990, they
all went on hunger strike to apply pressure on him to question the Iranian
government about the nation's Mujahedin prisoners.
"I was as high as a kite on hunger strike and I felt superhuman as if I had
transcended normal humanity," she says. "Shortly afterwards I walked out on my
job and went full-time with the movement.
"I didn't question anything. I was shown a film of a female suicide bomber
blowing up an ayatollah in Iran. It was horrific, and very shocking, at first,
but I was shown the film many times, and each time I was less distressed.
Eventually, I didn't bat an eyelid,"
By this time Anne barely saw her parents and she had ditched all her friends.
She had even publicly burned the diaries she had kept since childhood, as a
symbolic rejection of her past.
"If the leader had said 'kill yourself', I would have killed myself," she
says.
In l992, Anne was asked to go to Iraq for some military training. As a member
of an armed struggle, she knew this might be required and did not resist, even
relinquishing her passport to the Mujahedin when she arrived in the desert.
"You have no human rights, no nationality, you are simply a Mujahed," she
says.
"I loved the camp and it felt liberating to obey orders, because you lose all
responsibility for yourself. I felt like a child and thought if I put all my
trust in their hands, I would be okay," Anne says.
But in 1993 Anne started to have doubts about the movement after all members
were told that marriage was banned and all couples must get divorced. At this
time she met her current husband Massoud, another disillusioned member, and in
1996 they made the decision to leave.
With the Mujahedin in constant contact, initially it was extremely difficult
for them to adapt back into society and it took three years to make a complete
break and fully recover from their ordeal.
"We are both Muslims, but after we left, we would even go out and get drunk
just to be 'normal'," she says. "Being able to think for yourself again was
amazing, and we were like little kids doing things like going to the
supermarket and choosing our own food."
In 1999, Anne and Massoud discovered literature from the Cult Information Centre and discovered that the psychological coercion techniques used by the Mujahedin were methods all recognised and listed, and together, they now campaign to warn others that
anyone is vulnerable to these groups
"Look at the young men in West Yorkshire who are being targeted by the
terrorist organisations," she says.
"People across the UK must be asking what is wrong with the people in West
Yorkshire. There is nothing wrong with the people here, it is just that the
extremists are out there recruiting in the locality, using the same tried and
tested methods used by the Mujahedin and the many other disparate cults and
movements active around the world.
"Psychological manipulation can happen to anyone, any time. If you're lucky,
you end up with a timeshare.
"If you're unlucky you end up blowing yourself and innocent people up on the
