Haleh Esfandiari, the respected scholar and director of the Middle East program at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center, is back home in the United States.
Iranian authorities detained Esfandiari and took away her U.S. passport in January during a visit to her mother. They charged her with endangering Iranian national security.
In a recent column in the Washington Post, Esfandiari recounted the absurdity of the charges against her. “I, a 67-year-old grandmother, was being accused of threatening the security of the most populous and powerful country in the Middle East because I had organized conferences in Washington on Iran and other states in the region.”
In May, agents of the intelligence ministry placed Esfandiari under arrest. She spent 105 days in solitary confinement in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison. On Aug. 23, the Iranian government released Esfandiari as inexplicably as it had seized her.
Ten days later, she received her passport and boarded a plane to fly home.
Parnaz Azima, an Iranian American reporter for the Persian language broadcast service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, is also home. Iranian authorities had detained her in January on similar charges. She was allowed to leave Iran this week.
So was Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American social scientist who had been held since May.
Esfandiari, Azima and Tajbakhsh were among five Americans whose fate in Iran has been bound up with the January arrest in Iraq of five Iranian diplomats accused of arming and training Iraqi militants. Their release is an encouraging sign that, perhaps, the Iranian leadership is coming to realize the futility of arresting innocent foreigners and the public relations consequences of hostage taking.
If so, then the release of businessman Ali Shakeri — held on similarly trumped-up espionage charges — should soon follow.
And the Iranian government will clear up the mystery surrounding the disappearance of former FBI agent Robert Levinson during a spring visit to Kish Island, a resort island in the Persian Gulf.
