On Jan. 4, 2004, the U.S. placed 3,800 members of the Mujahedeen Khalq under "protective custody" at their camp at Ashraf, some 200 kilometres north of Baghdad. Among the 3,800 were 17 men and women from Canada, not all of them Canadian citizens.

It isn't the first time Canadians have been associated with the Khalq, whose name translates as "Fighters for the People."

Neda Hassani

In June 2003, Neda Hassani, a 26-year-old Iranian-Canadian set herself on fire outside the French embassy in London, killing herself to protest the arrest of Maryam Rajavi, one of leaders of the Khalq.

Hassani, an honours computer sciences student at Carleton University whose family fled Iran for Canada in 1980, was not a member of the Khalq, but she was a close friend of some members. Her suicide was also a protest against Iran's execution of one of her uncles, who had been a political prisoner.

The Mujahedeen Khalq began in the early 1960s, funded by radical university students in Tehran and adopting an ideology that combines elements of Marxism and Islam. Initially, the group declared itself willing to use force to fight the Western influence of the Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran.

As the only armed and organized opposition group during the final years of the shah's rule, many historians say that the Khalq played an important role in his eventual overthrow in 1979. But the group, with an ideology that combined elements of Marxism and Islam, soon fell out with its former allies. It then rallied against the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic, staging anti-Khomeini demonstrations.

In 1981 the group was forced to relocate to Paris, where it advocated the overthrow of the Islamic Republic by force. Under pressure from the French, the group relocated to Baghdad in 1986, where Saddam Hussein backed them as allies in his fight against the Islamic Republic in Iran.

In the years that followed, it has been described as a fanatical fringe movement, branded as terrorists by the United States in 1997 and the European Union in 2000.

Though the U.S. bombed the group's bases during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was slow to negotiate the group's surrender, allegedly because it valued the group's intelligence on Iran. Since then, the group has reportedly surrendered its weapons to the coalition forces, saying it no longer is a militant organization.

Members of the group in Paris raised funds for victims of the tragic earthquake in Iran in December 2003.

Warren Creates, a Canadian immigration lawyer who represents 40 of group's members in Iraq, told CBC Online that 100 of the Khalq's 3,800 members are citizens of countries other than Iran or Iraq. The other 3,700 are all Iranian nationals.