Americans were released by Iran in a prisoner swap, ending the nightmare

 Americans were released by Iran in a prisoner swap, ending the nightmare

Five Americans who have been imprisoned in Iran for years and who are largely considered as hostages are travelling back to the United States.

The final components of a contentious swap mediated by Qatar were completed when $6 billion (£4.8 billion) in Iranian money stored in South Korea reached Doha-area institutions.

It signalled the following action, which was to let the five American citizens in Tehran who are also Iranian citizens board a flight to Doha.

Senior US officials will welcome them, and they will then be flown to Washington.

Businessman Siamak Namazi, 51, 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 is also of British nationality, are reportedly among the Americans.

The US has claimed that its people were detained on spurious accusations so they could be used as political pawns.

They were transferred from Evin to a safe house in Tehran in the middle of August, which was the first sign that a bargain had been made.

As part of this exchange, clemency is also being granted to five Iranians who are now detained in US prisons, primarily on suspicion of breaking US sanctions. It is anticipated that some of them won't go back to Iran.

Reza Sarhangpour, Kambiz Attar Kashani, Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi, and Mehrdad Moein are their given names by Iran.

The dual nationals detained in Iran are who?

"The horror for Americans is now over. Professor Mehran Kamrava, who was born in Iran and currently works at Georgetown University in Qatar, reflected on the hardships of being kept in isolation, not knowing, and losing days.

The agreement is the result of months of mediated indirect negotiations by Qatar that started in February of last year.

There were reportedly nine rounds of contentious negotiations in Doha, with the American and Iranian delegations lodging in different hotels, according to a person briefed on the talks. Senior Qatari officials also travelled back and forth between Washington and Tehran.

"I think there's a little bit of a win for both sides," Prof. Kamrava told the BBC in Doha. With the election approaching, "[US President Joe] Biden is bringing Americans home, once and for Iran, there is the release of Iranians in prison in the United States of America, but it's that six billion [dollars] that is a big win,"

Iranian officials have stated time and time again that they will spend their money whatever they like. But others participating in the process insist that tight controls will be placed on these money.

They made a point of saying, "No money will go to Iran. "Only philanthropic transactions, paid to third-party vendors, transactions by transaction, including food, medicine, and agriculture."

According to sources, this money was not among the Iranian assets that the sanctions had frozen. Tehran had access to the proceeds from the sale of Iranian oil in South Korea for bilateral and non-sanctioned aid, but it refrained from using it for a number of reasons, including problems with currency translation.

The deal has been criticised by prominent US Republicans as a ransom payment and sanctions relief. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, criticised the US government for sending money to "the top state sponsor of terrorism in the world."

The American prisoners: Who are they?

Morad Tahbaz was detained in 2018 together with eight other environmental activists from Iran. They were accused of using their environmental programmes as a "cover to collect classified information" even though they had been employing cameras to monitor critically endangered wild Asiatic cheetahs. Denied the accusation yet received a 10-year jail term

Oil executive from Dubai named Siamak Namazi was detained in 2015. The year after Iranian authorities had permitted his elderly father Baquer to see his son, he was imprisoned. They were both given a 10-year prison term for "collaborating with a foreign enemy state," which they vehemently disputed. 

In 2022, Iran permitted Baquer to travel for medical treatment.

In 2018 while employed by an Iranian venture capital fund, Emad Shargi was detained. accused of spying, but then informed that the allegations against him had been dropped. notified by a court in 2020 that he had been found guilty in his absence and given a 10-year prison term. released before to an appeal and supposedly caught in 2021 while attempting to enter Iran illegally through the western border

The names of the two additional American prisoners are unknown.

The huge relief that some convicts are finally returning home is muted by the possibility that additional prisoners may be apprehended in the future. In Tehran, there are still more dual citizens incarcerated.

According to Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, "the Iranian government has turned into a hostage-taking government." They have been exploiting individuals as pawns as a way to exert pressure on the West.

The 2015 nuclear accord, which is viewed as all but dead after the then-US president, Donald Trump, walked out of it five years ago, is one of the long-standing conflicts and issues Qatar is hoping will help to catalyse. Others are still dubious.

Even if the Iranians claim they want to start a genuine diplomatic process, there is no deal or even serious negotiations, insists a Western official familiar with this dossier with hardly veiled annoyance.

They've taken some action, but we've instructed them on what to do to create the right conditions for diplomacy through the Omanis.

On the nuclear issue, sources claim that Iran appears to have slowed down its production of 60%-enriched uranium, a step back from weapons-grade levels of 90% but still higher than the limitations set in the 2015 agreement.

But worries about Iran's lack of candour on its nuclear aspirations continue to grow.

Rafael Grossi, the IAEA's director general, severely denounced Iran's "disproportionate and unprecedented" departure of more inspectors in a statement he released on Sunday. The action was referred to as "another step in the wrong direction" despite the fact that it was legally approved by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

63 nations also joined together to issue a declaration denouncing Iran's noncompliance with the NPT Safeguards Agreement last week in Vienna.

"Nobody should have any illusions that this deal will positively transform the US-Iran relationship," emphasises Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a research organisation with headquarters in Washington.

He refers to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying, "As long as Khamenei rules Iran, the Islamic Republic will continue to maintain strategic enmity with the United States." Having a foreign foe is advantageous to him and contributes to the image of the regime.

It has long been demanded of President Biden to return the Americans.

Siamak Namazi wrote to him earlier this year from behind bars, pleading with him to do more to keep the former Obama administration's commitment to return him "safely home within weeks." The "unenviable title of the longest held Iranian-American hostage in history," he claimed to hold.

He was detained while on a business trip to Tehran in 2015 and found guilty of collaborating with an adversarial country, i.e., the United States. When he travelled to Tehran to try to gain his release, his father Baquer was also arrested and found guilty of the same offence. But he was released in October of last year, reportedly for medical reasons. They were both unlawfully held, according to the US.

After getting guarantees from the British government that he would return to Britain along with two other British-Iranians who were arbitrarily jailed, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, last year, Morad Tahbaz and his family were likewise left feeling irate and abandoned.

This exchange will take place as Iran faces increasing pressure from the crushing effects of international sanctions and a year of extraordinary protests prompted by the death of Mahsa Amini while in the morality police's custody.