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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."