Five
Americans jailed for years in Iran and widely regarded as hostages are on their
way home to the United States.
The last pieces in a
controversial swap mediated by Qatar fell into place when $6bn (£4.8bn) of
Iranian funds held in South Korea reached banks in Doha.
It triggered the next step
- to allow the four American men and one woman in Tehran, who are also Iranian citizens,
to board a flight to Qatar's capital.
They will be met by senior
US officials and then flown to Washington.
The Americans are reported
to include 51-year-old businessman Siamak Namazi, who has spent nearly eight
years in Tehran's notorious Evin prison, as well as businessman Emad Shargi,
59, and environmentalist Morad Tahbaz, 67, who also holds British nationality.
The US has said its
citizens were imprisoned on baseless charges for use as political leverage.
In the first indication a
deal was reached, they were moved in mid-August from Evin to a safe house in
Tehran.
Five Iranians imprisoned in
US jails, mainly on charges of violating US sanctions, are also being granted
clemency as part of this swap. Not all of them are expected to return to Iran.
They have been named by
Iran Reza Sarhangpour, Kambiz Attar Kashani, Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi,
Mehrdad Moein Ansari, and Amin Hasanzadeh.
"The Americans' nightmare
is finally over. The solitary confinement, the not knowing, the lost days, the
incredibly difficult disruption to the rhythm of life," reflected
Iranian-born Professor Mehran Kamrava, who now teaches at Georgetown University
in Qatar.
The deal comes after months
of indirect talks mediated by Qatar, which began in February last year.
A source briefed on the
negotiations says there were at least nine rounds of difficult discussions in
Doha, with the American and Iranian delegations staying in separate hotels.
Senior Qatari officials also shuttled between Tehran and Washington.
"I think there's a
little bit of a win for both sides," Prof Kamrava told the BBC in Doha.
"For [US President Joe] Biden, heading into the election, he's bringing
Americans home and for Iran, there's the release of Iranians in prison in the
United States, but it's that six billion [dollars] that's a big win."
Iranian officials have
repeatedly declared they will spend their money as they wish. However, sources
involved in this process insist these funds will be strictly controlled.
"No funds will go into
Iran," they emphasized. "Only humanitarian transactions, including
food, medicine, agriculture, paid to third party vendors, transaction by
transaction."
Sources told the BBC this
money was not part of Iranian assets frozen by sanctions. The money in South
Korea, revenue from Iranian oil sales, had been available to Tehran for
bilateral and non-sanctioned aid but was not spent for various reasons
including difficulties of currency conversion.
Leading US Republicans have
denounced the deal as a ransom payment and sanctions relief. The Republican
chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, castigated the
US government for transferring funds to "the world's top state sponsor of
terrorism".
Who
are the American prisoners?
·Morad Tahbaz: Arrested
in 2018 along with eight other Iranian conservationists. They had been using
cameras to track critically endangered wild Asiatic cheetahs, but were accused
of using their environmental projects as a "cover to collect classified
information".
· Denied the charge but was sentenced to 10 years in prison
·Siamak Namazi: Dubai-based oil executive
arrested in 2015. His
elderly
father, Baquer, was detained the following year after Iranian officials
allowed him to visit his son. Both were sentenced to 10 years in prison for
"cooperating with a foreign enemy state", which they denied. Iran
let Baquer leave for medical treatment in 2022
·Emad Shargi: Detained in 2018 while
working for an Iranian venture capital fund. Released on bail and later told he
had been cleared of spying charges. Informed by a court in 2020 that he had
been convicted in absentia and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released ahead
of an appeal and reportedly detained in 2021 while trying to cross Iran's
western border illegally
"The Iranian
government has become a hostage-taking government," explains Sanam Vakil,
director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a
London-based think tank. "They have been using people as pawns, and that's
part of their leverage against the West."
Qatar is hoping this rare
moment of cooperation will help to catalyze progress on other long-standing
disagreements and disputes, including the 2015 nuclear deal regarded as all but
dead after the then-US president, Donald Trump, pulled out of it five years
ago. Others remain skeptical.
"There is no deal or
even serious talks, even though the Iranians claim they want to begin a serious
diplomatic process," insists a Western official familiar with this file
with barely concealed frustration. "They have taken some steps, but we
have told them, through the Omanis, what they should do to set conditions for
diplomacy to have a chance."
On the nuclear front,
sources say Iran appears to have slowed its production of 60%-enriched uranium
- a step back from weapons-grade levels of 90%, but higher than the limits
agreed in the 2015 accord.
But there's still deepening
concern about Iran's lack of transparency on its nuclear ambitions.
On Sunday, the director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, issued
a statement strongly condemning Iran's "disproportionate and
unprecedented" withdrawal of more IAEA inspectors. The move, while
formally permitted under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was called
"another step in the wrong direction".
Last week in Vienna, 63
countries also co-signed a statement condemning Iran's lack of cooperation
with the NPT Safeguards Agreement.
"Nobody should have
any illusion this deal will positively transform the US-Iran
relationship," underlines Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.
"As long as Khamenei
rules Iran, the Islamic Republic will continue to maintain strategic enmity
with the United States," he says in a reference to Iran's supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "It serves his interest to have an external
adversary and it's part of the regime's identity."
President Biden has long
been urged to bring the Americans home.
Earlier this year, Siamak
Namazi wrote to him from prison, imploring him to do more to honor the promise
of the former Obama administration to bring him "safely home within weeks".
He described himself as having the "unenviable title of the longest-held
Iranian-American hostage in history".
He was arrested during a
2015 business trip to Tehran and convicted of cooperating with a hostile
government - in other words, the United States. His father Baquer was also
detained and convicted on the same charge when he went to Tehran to try to
secure his release. But he was freed last October, ostensibly on medical
grounds. The US said they were both unjustly detained.
Morad Tahbaz and his family
were also left feeling angry and abandoned after receiving assurances from the
British government that he would return to Britain last year along with two
other British-Iranians who were detained arbitrarily, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
and Anoosheh Ashoori.
This swap comes at a time
when Iran is under mounting pressure from the crippling impact of international
sanctions, and a year of unprecedented protests sparked by the death in custody
of Mahsa Amini after she was detained by Iran's morality police.
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