Leftist Guerrilla Groups of Iran - History

History

The event from which most historians mark the beginning of the guerrilla era in Iran was the February 8, 1971 attack on a gendarmerie post at Siahkal on the Caspian Sea. Guerillas killed three policemen and freed two previously arrested guerrillas.

The guerilla organizations were quite active in the first half of the 1970s In the two and half years from mid 1973 through 1975, three United States colonels, a Persian general, a Persian sergeant, and a Persian translator of the United States Embassy were all assassinated by guerilla groups. On January 1976 eleven persons sentenced to death for these killings.

By the second half of the 1970s, however, the groups were in decline, suffering from factionalism and government repression.

• The People's Mujahedin of Iran (Sazman'i Mujahedin-i Khalq-i Iran) was in the middle of an internal debate over whether to continue armed struggle, and the group's own publications report few actions in 1978 and a `relative silence` as the number of actions decreased after June 1978.
• The Iranian People's Sacrificing Guerrillas (Cherik'ha-ye Feda'i-ye Khalq-e Iran), according to one of the group's leaders, `disintegrated and disappeared` after `the blows of 1976`, `set itself principally to protecting itself,` and engaged only in `scattered actions` to show that it still existed. Only a few dozen members remained at large. Ideologically, the group decided that objective conditions for revolution didn't exist, and as the Islamist movement escalated, the organization claimed credit for relatively few actions - one in the summer 1977, two in early 1978, and five in the summer of 1978, according to the group's pronouncements. At the end of the year, with membership presumably growing, the organization picked up its pace, claiming credit for a half-dozen actions in December 1978 and a dozen in January 1979.