The United States has no effective means of deterring Iran’s “tactic” of hostage-taking — a practice it has engaged in since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979 — Reuters assessed in a special report Wednesday.
In 1979, “Iran took 52 Americans hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran,” the report recounted. “Since then, it has detained at least 25 American citizens or permanent residents, Reuters found through interviews and a review of court documents and news reports.”
Administrations of both parties have tried everything “from military strikes to placating Iran through arms sales and cash payments,” but each hostage released has led to “more prisoners, concessions and tension.”
Kelly Magsamen, a former National Security Council official who specialized in Iran during both the Bush and Obama administrations, observed, “The Iranians are quite adept at, essentially, hostage-taking.”
Reuters described a dynamic that always leaves the U.S. (and other nations whose citizens are taken hostage by Iran) at a disadvantage. It noted that even as the U.S. was in late stages of negotiations to free Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, businessman Nosratollah Khosravi and student Matthew Trevithick in 2015, Iran arrested Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman.
When U.S. negotiators attempted to get Namazi included in the deal, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif refused. A former official familiar with the talks added “that trying to include him in the deal would blow up the rest of the deal.”
One of the uncertainties in dealing with Iran’s hostage-taking is whether or not to be quiet about. According to Bijan Khajehpour, a relative of Namazi, who was detained by Iran in 2009, said, “They arrest someone and then they always tell the families, ‘Oh don’t tell anyone, this is a matter of one week or two weeks and then it will be resolved.’ ”
There doesn’t appear to be a clear U.S. policy on whether to publicize the arrests, rather there’s “an ad hoc mix of what the family wants and the inclinations of U.S. negotiators.”
In the case of Xiyue Wang, a Princeton graduate student who was arrested nearly two years ago, the government and others recommended to his family that it would be better for them to be quiet about his detention. Despite abiding by these suggestions, it was the Iranian government that publicized the arrest of Wang a year ago.
Wang’s wife said last year, “We actually didn’t expect that the situation could last this long.”
However, academic Shaul Bakhash, whose wife Haleh Esfandiari, who was arrested by Iran in 2007 insisted, “it’s always wrong to stay quiet.”
“It’s important for the Iranian authorities … to realize that this kind of conduct is unacceptable by international standards,” Bakhash asserted.
Reuters reported last November that since the nuclear deal was agreed to with Iran in 2015, at least 30 foreign nationals have been arrested by the regime.
One of them, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, is an aid worker employed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. She was detained at Tehran’s airport in April 2016, separated from her child, and charged with the “design and implementation of cyber and media projects to cause the soft toppling of the Islamic Republic.” She was later sentenced to five years in prison for attempting to overthrow the government.
In Why Does Iran Keep Taking American Hostages?, published in the September 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Iran expert Ali Alfoneh described the regime’s detainment of foreign and dual-nationals as “a perfectly normal procedure and political practice in the Islamic Republic. That has been the case since the first day of the revolution and continues until today.”
[Photo: ABC News / YouTube ]