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FOR Commander Hakimeh Saadat-Nejal, the death of six of her colleagues in a bomb attack on a Baghdad bus yesterday will do little to deter her determination to overthrow the Iranian government.
She is an officer in the National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA), the military army of one of Iran's main opposition groups, the Mujahideen Khalq, and is based in Ashraf camp -one of 17 military camps on the salt plains of the desert in Iraq on the border with Iran. A third of the 30,000 soldiers and 70 per cent of the officers are women.
The attack injured 23 mujahideen and blasted a crater two metres deep and three metres wide outside the Hemadi Shahab hospital in north-east Baghdad. It came as no surprise to Commander Hakimeh and her fellow soldiers, who have been on full alert since the Revolutionary Guards of Iran began several days of military exercises within sight of the NLA camps two weeks ago.
The war games are believed to be a response by the Iranian government to claims by the Mujahideen Khalq that its members assassinated Brig Ali Sayyad Shirazi, a senior military commander in Tehran. To many, the Mujahideen Khalq are merely pawns of President Saddam Hussein. He has been generous to the rebel organisation, which has had a presence in Iraq since l986 and has donated...