ARMED WOMEN OF IRAN

By Michael S. Serrill

A few months ago, Batul Ebrahami, 18, was a high school student in Tehran. The daughter of a shopkeeper, she was relatively well off but enormously frustrated with the dictates of the Islamic fundamentalists who rule Iran. "Women were not allowed to do anything productive," she complains.

After two arrests by Iran's ubiquitous secret police for openly complaining about the mullahs, Ebrahami fled, but not to Europe or the U.S. Today she resides in a dusty camp in Iraq, a soldier in one of the most unusual and little known military forces in the world. The National Liberation Army (N.L.A.) of Iran is 30,000 strong, fully armored and ready at any moment to do battle. Some 35% of its soldiers are women, as are 70% of its officers. The troops wear no insignia of rank, live communally and receive no pay. They have taken a vow to remain celibate until Iran is freed. And all express near fanatical loyalty to the woman they hope to install as the next President of Iran: Maryam Rajavi.

Successors to the leftist People's Mujahedin, which helped overthrow Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the soldiers of the rebel force are bivouacked in five camps in the barren salt desert of Iraq, just out of range of Iranian artillery. Critics call them pawns of the Iraqis, who are said to have given the resisters money and arms in addition to a generous swath of desert land. They also say Rajavi hardly represents a democratic alternative to the current regime.

But the N.L.A. remains the strongest opposition to a government that last week was again proved to be an international renegade. A German court, in convicting four men of the 1992 murder of four Iranian Kurd dissidents in Berlin, found that the killings were approved at the "highest state levels" in Tehran. After the verdict, Germany recalled its ambassador, ejected four Iranian diplomats and announced it was reassessing the policy of "critical dialogue" that has allowed Bonn to become Iran's principal Western trading partner.

The Germans' anger could only give heart to the N.L.A., whose desert battalions have been poised to make war against the fundamentalist government since 1988. The army's finest moment came in 1991, when it successfully fought off a large-scale incursion by a force of elite Revolutionary Guards. The N.L.A.'s officers claim they have launched more than 100 cross-border operations against Iran in the past several years. The Iranians have responded with terrorist strikes, Scud missiles and, in January, a mortar assault on the N.L.A.'s fortified compound in downtown Baghdad, causing minor damage.

When the moment is right, say leaders of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (N.C.R.), the rebels' civilian arm, the N.L.A. will roll across the border in support of a general uprising against the fundamentalist Iranian government. "We intend to combine the army with the rising of social unrest to sweep away the mullahs," N.C.R. president Maryam Rajavi told Time. "The mullahs are a regime that doesn't understand any language other than force and power." N.C.R. leaders believe, perhaps too optimistically, that burgeoning discontent with Iran's faltering economy, which has led to open protests and riots in recent months, means their moment may soon be at hand.

Rajavi, a former student leader trained as a metallurgical engineer, rules the rebel force together with her husband Massoud, who was head of the People's Mujahedin when the Shah was overthrown and exiled in 1979. Massoud was soon forced to flee the country as the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini began killing and imprisoning Massoud's largely secular followers. Since then Maryam and Massoud have built up not only one of the world's most formidable rebel armies but a sophisticated resistance movement as well, with offices around the world, plus five radio stations and a new satellite-television network that beam anti-mullah propaganda daily into Iranian homes.

The prominence of women is the rebel movement's most striking feature. "When I was in Iran, I was taught that I was nothing," Ebrahami says. "I could have no job. I was no use to society. After learning to fight and working with men as an equal, I feel pride."

"Wanna take a ride?" shouts Moujila Nasferi, a tank driver who left a comfortable life in the U.S. seven years ago to join Rajavi's warriors. Her face and hands stained black from cleaning her Russian T-55 tank's gun barrel, Nasferi slips into the small driver's hatch beneath the turret of the tank, which jumps as she jams it into gear and guides it easily across the desert. In Washington, where she lived from 1977 to 1989, "I had my own house, a car and a job, but I kept listening to reports of how bad things were in my country," she says. So she decided she had to go home.

That she is one of thousands of women who have joined the rebel movement is a measure of the degree to which Tehran has trampled women's rights, says Maryam Rajavi. "The worst and most savage of the regime's repression is directed toward women," she says. "So in our army, women have key roles."

Women--dressed in fatigues topped off with green scarves--not only drive tanks but also pilot attack helicopters and command mixed-sex battalions. "The women are for real," says Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert at the National Defense University in Washington. "They have a role in combat and a significant role in the organization." Men and women live separately, even when married to each other, in neat, clean, 20-bed dormitories. The men have learned to respect the women's military skills. Says Ali Andelavi, 25, a defector from the Revolutionary Guards who is now an engineer in the rebel army: "In Iran I didn't recognize women even to speak to them. I thought they were subhuman. Here many of my commanders are women."

Notwithstanding their credentials as fighters against a government Washington loves to hate, the N.C.R. and the N.L.A. have no backing on the banks of the Potomac. Clinton Administration officials stand by a 1994 State Department report that accuses Massoud Rajavi and other People's Mujahedin leaders of terror against the U.S. in the 1970s. The report goes on to charge that the group still has Marxist leanings, strong ties to Saddam Hussein and few democratic tendencies. "There is a cult of personality around Massoud and Maryam Rajavi that is unhealthy," says Michael Eisenstadt, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy. "If they were to achieve power, it is unlikely they would give it up."

Western experts doubt claims by the N.C.R. that it is funded by the Iranian exile community, contending that Saddam pays for its operations. Most of the N.L.A.'s armor and other equipment, they say, was captured from Iran toward the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988. The Massouds "are simply not a viable alternative to the current regime because of their ties to Iraq," says Eisenstadt. Clawson says the People's Mujahedin's radical-left politics is also out of step. "Their day is past," he says.

But one cannot tell that from the bustle of military activity at the Zahra Rajabi training base in southern Iraq, where volunteers get their basic training. Commander Mehdi Madadi says he has seen a 500% rise in new recruits in the past year. "We are seeing young people come across the border in groups of 15 and 20," he says. "They don't remember the Shah or know much about the People's Mujahedin. They just have no hope and no future."

Mojtaba Shadbash, 23, is one of them. Her brother joined the N.L.A. a year ago, she said, and she was subsequently arrested and harassed by Iranian police. Two months ago, she walked for two days across the mountains to join her brother in the Iraqi desert. Her sole aim: "I want to overthrow the regime." Her passion, and that of her companions in arms, is not enough. But clearly the National Liberation Army will remain a knife in the side of the Tehran government for years to come.

--Reported by Edward Barnes/Al-Ashraf Camp

With reporting by EDWARD BARNES/AL-ASHRAF CAMP