400 Iran Exiles Reluctantly Move to New Iraq Home Lugging clothes, tables and whatever else they could carry, roughly 400 members of an Iranian exile group reluctantly moved Saturday from their camp in northwestern Iraq to a deserted military base outside the capital in what they called a show of good faith that they eventually will be allowed to leave the country peacefully. It was the first group to move of the more than 3,300 members of the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran who have lived at Camp Ashraf for three decades. They left under pressure from the Iraqi government, whose army stormed Ashraf last April in a raid that left 34 of the exiles dead. The United Nations also wants the exiles to move to the Camp Liberty military base outside Baghdad, where they can be screened for asylum eligibility and, presumably, better protected. The process of moving the exiles to the new location has proceeded in fits and starts over recent months. Iraqi soldiers searched the exiles for almost an entire day before they left Ashraf, and they were being searched again Saturday morning before they were allowed into Liberty. Members were reluctant to leave their home, which they turned into a miniature city with parks and a university, in favor of an abandoned military base. Residents have not strayed outside for years. "People are very upset," said Bahzad Saffari, 50, a camp resident since 2003 who was among the first group of exiles to go. It took many days to convince them to go. He said soldiers ordered the exiles to leave some of their heirlooms behind, including photographs, microwave ovens, satellite dishes for Internet access and, in one case, a pair of therapeutic socks. "They say it has metal in the socks and so they must be bulletproof," Saffari said as the exiles were being searched at the camp. Who wears bulletproof socks? Some of the people are very much bothered and they said, 'If it is going to be like this, you can imagine how Liberty will be.' This is to break the morale of the people. A spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the exiles are in Iraq illegally but that the move is a first step toward to sending them out of the country. "We consider the moving of Ashraf people to the new location as a positive step toward reaching a final solution for their presence in Iraq and sending them to a third country," al-Maliki media adviser Ali al-Moussawi said Friday night. During the past years, the presence of the (exiles) has represented a problem to the Iraqi government because their staying was illegal, and it was a source of irritation to some neighboring countries. The People's Mujahedeen, which seeks the overthrow of Tehran's clerical rulers, has been labeled everything from a cult to a terrorist organization - although one that has provided the U.S. with intelligence on Iran. The group says it renounced violence in 2001, after carrying out bloody bombings and assassinations in Iran in the 1980s. Also known by its Farsi name, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, the group is the militant wing of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran. The U.S. considers it a terrorist organization although the European Union removed it from its terror list two years ago. They were welcomed to Iraq by Saddam Hussein during the 1980s in a common fight against Iran. But since Saddam's ouster they have been an irritant to the Iraqi government and which is trying to build stronger ties with Iran.