Iranian opposition group claims attack on Khamenei headquarters

PMOI/MEK says dawn assault on heavily guarded Tehran complex led to heavy clashes with IRGC.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

An armed Iranian opposition group announced Monday that it had attacked the Tehran headquarters of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Command Headquarters of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) said that it had engaged with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) “in a series of heavy clashes” that began at dawn, during the call to morning prayer, and lasted until the afternoon.

Its target, the Motahari Complex, houses key leadership bodies, including the offices of the Guardian Council, Assembly of Experts, Supreme National Security Council and the Expediency Council.

The compound also reportedly serves as the residence and office of Mojtaba Khamenei, the supreme leader’s son and widely viewed heir apparent.

According to the group, the complex is surrounded by more than four-meter-high reinforced concrete walls topped with anti-drone and anti-projectile barriers, with each building separately fortified.

Nearly 5,000 members of the elite IRGC Vali-e Amr Protection Corps and Ansar al-Mahdi Corps are tasked with guarding the site, it said.

PMOI/MEK claimed it received inside assistance before the assault, including the disabling of several of the 17 rotating surveillance cameras surrounding the half-square-kilometer compound.

The group reported that more than 100 of its fighters were killed, wounded or arrested during and after the clashes, while more than 150 others positioned outside the complex as a security perimeter “safely returned to their bases by midnight.”

It did not provide figures for IRGC casualties but described them as “heavy,” citing continued ambulance traffic into the compound until noon.

The group acknowledged that its men are still in danger, saying, “Surveillance operations, pursuit, and arrests are continuing in the most brutal manner across various parts of Tehran and surrounding cities.”

Regime-backed media did not try to cover up the attack.

IRGC-linked Bultan News wrote that repeated explosions in the Pasteur Street area — described as the most secure district in the capital — raised “a serious question” about how adversaries could strike “the heart of Tehran.”

Founded in 1965 to oppose Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the MEK later participated in the protests that led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

It soon broke with the new clerical regime and was violently suppressed, with tens of thousands of members reportedly executed over the years.

The group’s leadership fled to Iraq, where it established a government-in-exile structure.

Since 2013, it has operated from Albania and presents itself as a democratic alternative to Iran’s current regime, with some support in the US Congress, though critics have accused it of authoritarian internal practices.