‘People’s army’ established by exiled Iranian revolutionaries is now a ‘mafia group’ that controls the country, writes Akhtar Makoii
The first members of what would later become Iran’s fearsome revolutionary guards were trained in a quiet village outside Paris.
Those close to the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was in exile in Neauphle-le-Château, secretly began recruiting Iranian revolutionaries in the West to establish a “people’s army”.
One of the group’s founders, Mohsen Sazegara, has told The Telegraph that the aim in 1978 was to gather loyalists prepared to confront the Shah’s regime head on in Iran.