Forgotten in Evin: Americans Held in Iran’s Notorious Prison Are Seldom Mentioned as War Drags On

The ceasefire between the United States and Iran, nominally in place since April 8, is no longer merely fraying. It is being shot through.American warplanes carried out a second round of strikes on Iran into Thursday morning, the third exchange of fire this week, after President Trump warned that Tehran would “pay the price” for stalled negotiations. Iran answered with missile and drone fire on Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan, all hosts to American troops.For the Americans believed to be locked inside Tehran’s Evin Prison, each new salvo deepens the peril: no evacuation notice, no transfer order, and no clear path to resolution.The James W. Foley Legacy Foundation says at least six Americans are believed to be held by Tehran and that they face “unprecedented danger” because of the military conflict. The United States government has declined to confirm how many of its nationals are in custody for security reasons.Pakistan helped mediate the latest truce, which includes a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with both Washington and Tehran publicly claiming victory. But the ceasefire was showing cracks well before this week, with Vice President JD Vance calling it “fragile.”The Strait of Hormuz is still largely impassable, with vessel traffic reduced to roughly 5 percent of pre-conflict levels by some estimates, though United States Central Command disputes Tehran’s claim of a full closure. Washington maintains a counter-blockade on Iranian ports, and Iran threatens military action if it is not lifted. Iran, meanwhile, suspended all indirect talks with Washington on June 1, citing Israel’s expanding offensive in Lebanon, before partially reversing course within hours, a measure of how shaky the diplomatic footing has become. The concern for the detainees predates the ceasefire. On June 23, 2025, during the 12-day Israel-Iran conflict, Israeli warplanes struck Evin Prison during visiting hours — hitting the main entrance, the clinic, the visitors’ center, and several prison wards. Iranian authorities said at least 79 people were killed, among them inmates, visiting family members, medical staff, and teenage conscript soldiers stationed at the doors.Human Rights Watch called the strike “unlawfully indiscriminate” and an apparent war crime. The bombs made no distinction between guards and the imprisoned.At least one American detainee was among prisoners shackled and transferred to another facility without belongings or medication before being returned to Evin, where he now shares a small cell with up to 18 other inmates amid severe shortages of food, water, sanitation, and medical care.The families of other foreign nationals imprisoned at Evin told European news outlets that during the current round of fighting, explosions were close enough to blow out the detention center’s windows.A former Iranian-American detainee, Siamak Namazi, who endured nearly eight years inside Evin’s walls before his release in 2023, has been among the most vocal in warning of the detainees’ exposure.“They are the easiest-to-grab punching bag right now in the hands of that rogue regime,” Mr. Namazi said. “I think this is a dangerous time. For a hostage or wrongfully detained citizen abroad, their biggest fear is to be forgotten, and this is a very dangerous time for them, with all that’s going on in Washington’s mind.”Who is fighting for the Americans still locked inside, and does anyone in Washington even know their names?The Americans left behindTwo of the possible six United States nationals held by Tehran have been publicly named: a 49-year-old journalist, Abdolreza “Reza” Valizadeh, whom the State Department formally designated as “wrongfully detained” in May 2025; and a 60-something jeweler from Great Neck, Long Island, Kamran Hekmati, who was detained at Tehran’s airport in May 2025 while attempting to return home and was formally arrested on July 28.Both were being held at Evin before the war started, and there has been no confirmed information on their whereabouts or condition since.Agents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps detained Mr. Valizadeh in September 2024, confiscated his belongings, including his United States passport, and took him to the notorious Evin, where he spent weeks in isolation undergoing intense interrogation. Iranian officials did not publicly acknowledge his arrest for nearly two months.Mr. Valizadeh was sentenced to 10 years after being charged with “collaborating with a hostile government” — a vague offense the regime routinely deploys against journalists and activists — following a trial lasting less than an hour in which the judge served simultaneously as prosecutor. His appeal was rejected in January 2025. His family says he has suffered from coughing fits and been denied medication for his asthma.Mr. Hekmati, who runs a jewelry business in Manhattan’s Diamond District and has lived in Great Neck for decades, emigrated to the United States at age 13, years before the 1979 revolution. He was stopped at the airport in May when authorities spotted date-stamped photos on his phone from a trip to Israel taken 13 years earlier to attend his son’s Bar Mitzvah.He was sentenced to four years, without legal representation, under an Iranian law barring citizens from traveling to Israel. This sentence was subsequently reduced, first to two years and then to one. Secretary of State Rubio designated him as wrongfully detained in March 2026. Mr. Hekmati has bladder cancer and is in poor health, according to family members who spoke anonymously out of fear of repercussions. In December, Iranian authorities charged him a second time, accusing him of meeting with Mossad agents abroad — an allegation his family categorically denies. Then there is the case of a Los Angeles resident named Afarin Mohajer, 70, who was also detained on September 29 at Tehran’s airport as she was attempting to leave the country. Ms. Mohajer was charged with posting propaganda critical of the Islamic Republic on social media and insulting its supreme leader and Islam, according to her son.The dual citizen was briefly released from Evin prison on bail in December but remains barred from leaving Iran. Ms. Mohajer’s son, Germany-based political activist Reza Zarrabi, has said his mother is not politically active and that he believes she was arrested to pressure him into ending his opposition activities.She has an inoperable brain tumor and was told by a doctor before her imprisonment that she does not have long to live, according to Mr. Zarrabi.The identities of additional Americans in custody have not been confirmed.A partner at Akin Gump representing Mr. Valizadeh, Ryan Fayhee, cautions that communications have gone completely dark.“It’s totally black for us. We aren’t able to communicate with Reza or his family in Tehran,” Mr. Fayhee told reporters. “He must be feeling very helpless right now.”Mr. Fayhee has pressed both the White House and State Department to take every precaution around the prison’s perimeter.A regime that runs on hostagesData compiled by the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation and shared exclusively with the Sun underscores just how deliberate Tehran’s hostage-taking has become.Of 38 Americans wrongfully detained by Iran since the 1979 hostage crisis, 32 — 84 percent — are dual United States-Iranian nationals. The foundation has identified at least 39 instances of Americans being wrongfully detained by Iranian authorities since the revolution, with Iran holding at least one American continuously since 2007. The majority were in Iran for family reasons.“Anyone with a blue passport can be a target,” the director of hostage advocacy and research at the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, Elizabeth Richards, tells The New York Sun. “The Americans being held in Iran are innocent — they were targeted because they are Americans.”Ms. Richards noted that some detainees have serious health conditions requiring medication, access to which has been severed by the strikes, and that the foundation cannot rule out additional detentions since hostilities began, given the near-total blackout of information coming from Iran.An assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, Danielle Gilbert, tells the Sun that the driving force behind Iran’s hostage policy is institutional, not personal to any one individual such as the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei.“We should understand Iran’s hostage diplomacy not as a tool particular to Khamenei, but rather, the remit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” Ms. Gilbert says. “In the absence of dramatic changes to the regime and military power structures in Iran, I would expect their hostage taking to continue.”On dual nationals, she is equally direct.“War or no, the United States government would tell anyone considering travel to Iran that they should not go,” Ms. Gilbert stresses. “Now, the ongoing war only makes that decision more dangerous.”A retired Army special forces officer who specialized in hostage negotiations, Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine, also underscores that the calculus has shifted in a dangerous direction since the death of the previous supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.“The most extreme elements of the IRGC appear to have a bigger voice than ever following Khamenei’s death, and they favor hostage taking as a tool,” Mr. Amerine tells the Sun. “Hostage taking by Iranian surrogates is likely a greater danger now than it has been for decades.”Lost in the noise of warRoger Carstens, who served as United States special envoy for hostage affairs under both the Biden and first Trump administrations, has said he does not know whether the cases of the detained Americans were raised during pre-war negotiations led by President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff.He also said that when negotiating to bring Mr. Shargi and Mr. Namazi home, “we were very cognizant of the connection between the nuclear talks and that of the prisoner talks, because if the nuclear talks suddenly fail very horribly, the prisoner talks could be pulled down with it.”Emad Shargi, who spent five years in Evin before his 2023 release, offers a visceral description of what confinement feels like when the outside world ignites.“Whenever there is an issue taking place in Iran, the walls of Evin are like an amplifier,” says Mr. Shargi, who resided in Washington, D.C., before his imprisonment. “So, when there’s a ripple outside in the society, there’s a tidal wave inside.”His sister, Neda Sharghi, has urged the administration to separate the hostage cases from the broader war calculus, warning that American detainees “always become a hostage to other bigger, broader political issues.”As the ceasefire took hold, two French former detainees who had spent more than three years in Evin were allowed to return home, with one describing years of ‘daily horror’ inside the prison. For the Americans still inside, no such exit has materialized. The Islamabad talks took place April 11-12, lasting 21 hours before both delegations departed without a deal. Nuclear enrichment proved the insurmountable sticking point — Mr. Trump said most points were agreed to, “but the only point that really mattered, nuclear, was not.”Iran’s foreign minister said the sides came within inches of a memorandum of understanding but accused Washington of maximalism and moving the goalposts. Whether the fate of the detained Americans was formally raised in the room is unclear. Since then the diplomatic picture has darkened further. Iran suspended all talks at the beginning of this month, threatening complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the activation of additional fronts, including the Bab al-Mandab Strait, in response to continued Israeli operations in Lebanon. Mr. Trump said a deal remains within reach, yet for the Americans inside Evin, the gap between Washington’s optimism and their reality has rarely felt wider. “The Hostage Envoy office has done a commendable job freeing hostages, but they do not have sufficient resources to help all in need,” Mr. Amerine says. “Simply showing US concern for the prisoners has the inverse effect of causing Iran to make them into a bargaining chip and potentially worsening their captivity. This is a situation where the US rightfully attempts to distance itself from such prisoners.”

Forgotten in Evin: Americans Held in Iran’s Notorious Prison Are Seldom Mentioned as War Drags On

Forgotten in Evin: Americans Held in Iran’s Notorious Prison Are Seldom Mentioned as War Drags On

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