“I've been a hostage for seven and a half years now.” US citizen Siamak Namazi is the longest serving American in Iranian prison. Now, he’s speaking in an unprecedented interview from inside Evin prison to plead President Biden to get him released. “This is a desperate measure.”
“I know what it feels like to be left behind and I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy,” Siamak Namazi tells me from inside Evin prison. He is pushing for President Biden to get him & his two jailed compatriots, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Sharghi, freed. “We’re all in this together.”
“I’ve never had any response” to his letter to President Biden, imprisoned American Siamak Namazi tells me in an emotional conversation from Iran’s Evin prison. “This is what makes things particularly painful… I have not heard anything.”
“My very humanity has been taken away from me, not just my freedom,” says Siamak Namazi, still imprisoned in Iran for over 7 years now. “Human traffickers have more rights than I do.” He recalls how in the first two years of his ordeal, “I spent months caged in a solitary cell.”
Siamak Namazi is the American imprisoned longest in Iran, over seven years, yet never released with other dual nationals. When he wasn’t released with others in 2016, “I was completely devastated, shattered, despondent,” he says. “One day I realize everyone’s gone and I’m left.”
“If you want to get me bawling, talk about my dad,” says Siamak Namazi, an American imprisoned in Iran for over 7 years. Though now free, his father Baquer was jailed for years, and Siamak tells me it filled him with guilt. “My dad is my hero… [yet was] arrested because of me.”
As our unprecedented conversation from inside Evin prison drew to a close, imprisoned American Siamak Namazi wanted to be sure he delivered one clear message direct to President Biden. Watch.
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