A few days ago I was at a dinner party in Baghdad, chatting with an American official who wanted to know why the press corps was "so sympathetic" to the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian dissident/militant group with a base in Iraq.

Another reporter interjected: "We're not! Everybody knows they're a cult. But that doesn't mean the Iraqis should mow them over with Humvees while the U.S. watches!"

"Well," the American official asked, "what would you do?

And that's the problem. Nobody has a good answer for what to do with the MEK.

The Humvee incident my colleague referred to wasn't a hypothetical scenario -- you can see footage of it on this previous blog post. And, yes, the U.S. military did stand by as 11 MEK members were killed that day. The AP's account of the Iraqi siege says that video shows American soldiers "get into a white SUV and roll up their windows as the bloodied men plead for help." U.S. officials told the AP they no longer have a legal right to intervene.

The Mujahedin_e Khalq -- known in various circles as the MEK, MKO or PMOI -- is an Iranian militant group that's committed to the overthrow of the theocratic regime in Tehran. In 1986, the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein allowed the MEK to set up base about 65 miles north of Baghdad, in a sprawling compound that became known as Camp Ashraf. The group was disarmed following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and the residents there lived in limbo under U.S. protection from the hostile new Iranian-backed Iraqi government. Iraqi Shiite Muslim leaders, many of whom lived for years in Iran, have been eager to return the dissidents to Tehran, where they could face persecution.

The MEK's tactics have earned the group a spot on the U.S. State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. Some U.S. politicians have lobbied to remove them from the list and recruit them for intelligence-gathering on Iran. There are reports that the group already has provided the U.S. government with information on Iran's nuclear program.

Ever since the July 28 confrontation at Ashraf, life inside the camp has become increasingly untenable. Like all reporters in Baghdad, I get regular calls from the MEK. A couple of years ago, when the group was under U.S. protection, MEK members would come to Baghdad with piles of propaganda documents to support their cause. And I also visited them, when Ashraf was a tidy oasis of fountains and music concerts in the middle of a raging war.

Well, the war has finally caught up to Ashraf and the camp is no longer immune to the violence around it. Now surrounded by Iraqi forces, nobody can go in or out and food is delivered by private vendors who leave the goods at the gate. The 3,000 or so Iranian exiles still inside are virtual prisoners, cut off from the rest of the country and with no viable escape routes.

The Iraqi government wants to return them to Iran, which the group has said it will accept only with "preconditions" that protect them from retaliation. (For example, one of the MEK's preconditions is "freedom of speech." Anyone who's been watching the post-election turmoil in Iran knows that no such right exists there.) Human rights workers would like to resettle MEK members into other countries, perhaps in Europe or Canada, but no willing nation has emerged. What the group really wants is to stay in Iraq, which, of course, it can't.

So back to the question posed at the dinner party: What to do with the MEK?

The MEK and its well-oiled publicity machine aren't waiting silently for an answer: Hundreds of MEK members and supporters -- in Iraq and abroad -- are on about the 50th day of a hunger strike. They're demanding the release of 36 detainees in Iraqi custody, the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Ashraf, and for U.S. protection until the UN offers another protective force. Disturbing photos of the hunger strikers in Iraq show people who appear to be days away from death: concave cheeks, sunken eyes and IV drips.

As the American official was getting at: Why should we have sympathy for members of a former militant group who are starving themselves?

Sympathy is up to you. But if a minority population -- no matter how dubious its cause -- is under siege and threatened with death as a result of being left vulnerable in a U.S.-led war, the issue at hand is responsibility, not sympathy.