ERBIL, Kurdistan Region–The remaining members of Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) are expected to be expelled from Iraq in the near future, the Iranian Ambassador to Iraq said on Thursday.

“The Iraqi government has long sought to expel the monafeqin [hypocrites] terrorist group members, but this process has been delayed due to pressure from the US and some of its allies,” Iran’s Press TV quoted Ambassador Hassan Danaeifar as saying.

The Iraqi government, Danaeifar said, in cooperation with the UN has expelled 65 percent of MEK members from the country in recent years and the rest will leave soon. There are no confirmed numbers but estimates place the number of MEK members still in Iraq at around 500 MEK.

“This terrorist group has not just the blood of Iranian, but also Iraqi people on their hands,” Danaeifar said.

The Iranian diplomat described MEK members as the “main participant of Saddam’s crimes, especially during the Iraq-Iran war and Kurds’ uprising.”

Baghdad agreed to relocate over 3,000 MEK members from Ashraf camp in Diyala province to Liberty Camp near Baghdad’s airport in 2012 when the US government removed the MEK from its list of terrorist organizations the same year.

In 2013, at the request of the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Albania took in over 200 MEK members on humanitarian grounds.

Tehran counts MEK as a terrorist organization and accuses it of being behind a number of assassinations and bombings in the Iranian capital in the 1980s.