Namazi previously spoke with Amanpour by phone in March 2023 from inside Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, in what was an unprecedented interview. He was the longest-held Iranian-American prisoner, excluded from three separate deals that freed other detained Americans during the Obama and Trump administrations.

‘The smell of freedom’

On 18 September 2023, Namazi stepped off the plane and onto American soil. At the top of the airplane steps, he paused to breathe in the air. It was, he tells Amanpour, a tribute to what his uncle had told Namazi and his brother Babak when they first immigrated to the United States in 1983.

“Can you smell that?” Namazi’s uncle asked his young nephews. “That is the smell of freedom.” Forty years later, Siamak Namazi emerged into the night air after eight years in prison. “I remembered what he said. And I felt it this time. I felt the smell of freedom.”

Now, he says, “the most dominant feeling that I have is gratitude… particularly (towards) President (Joe) Biden, who made a very difficult choice and struck the deal.” But, that said, he explains it has been “very difficult” to adjust to life outside.

After so long behind bars, he even had to set an alarm to remind himself just to leave the apartment. “I remember once I hadn’t left for three days, and I realized why. I just wasn’t used to doing that.”

Today, he is still putting together the pieces of his life. “It’s an eight-year earthquake that hits your life – and it leaves a lot of destruction.

“But I would say I do feel very free in the US – and I tried to live the freest life I could, even when I was in Evin.”

‘They wanted a death sentence’

Namazi was born in Iran and, after moving to America age 12, he had returned to his country of birth many times. In 2015, he went back for a funeral and felt little reason to worry. It was a period he describes as “the peak of Iran-US relations,” with high-level delegations from both countries in Vienna, Austria, to negotiate what would become the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA.

But at the airport, as he tried to leave, he recalls how everything changed. He was approached “by a man in a plain suit who said, ‘Come with me.’” Namazi says he refused and asked for identification. Then, as the man went to get a uniformed official to enforce his demand, Namazi urgently messaged his brother: “Pulling me aside at airport.”

“After that, I was interrogated off site illegally for three months and then I was finally arrested. I was charged formally with cooperating with a hostile state – referring to the United States of America.” It took six years for him to secure his full file and discover exactly what he was accused of.

He says that Iran’s authorities claimed that “for three decades, (Namazi) had been building a network within Iran to infiltrate and topple the Islamic Republic with the cooperation of the hostile US state. Now, I was arrested at 44. So, these guys are pretty much claiming that when I was learning to skateboard with my buddy Dave in White Plains, New York, I was actually subverting the Islamic Republic.”

While today he almost laughs at the absurdity of the “ridiculous” charges he faced, he knows the danger he was in. “They wanted a death sentence for me.”

Namazi was not naïve. He knew that the real reason he was being taken was to function as a bargaining chip for the regime. That, he says, gave him some comfort – but not for long.

“I assumed that because I’m a hostage and I have value, they will not harm me. Unfortunately, that assumption was proven wrong.”

‘Profound effect’

Soon after his arrest, Namazi says, he was “thrown in a solitary cell… the size of a closet.” When facing his interrogators, he says he was told that “unless you cooperate… you are going to be here until your teeth and your hair are the same color. And our methodology of how we’re talking is going to change.”

That, he says, was a clear threat of violence.

In all, Namazi endured around eight months of solitary confinement, along with what he calls “unutterable indignities.” He was blindfolded and beaten, but the worst was the “humiliation,” he says.

“That I’m not comfortable talking about,” he tells Amanpour. “And I mean unutterable – because it had a profound effect on me. I still haven’t even gotten to talking about it fully in therapy.”

Eventually, Namazi’s mother was permitted to visit. The first visit was before he was beaten, but even then, his appearance had changed so much that she didn’t recognize her own son. “I looked like Saddam (Hussein) when they pulled him out of that hole. I had (a) long beard,” he recalls. “I remember her sobbing and I remember trying to make her laugh by telling her, ‘I look like Saddam.’”

After that visit, he says, the beatings began, and lasted for weeks. “It’s much scarier than I could tell you,” Namazi recalls with emotion – particularly as he knew that the Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi had died in similar circumstances in 2003. “I knew how unsafe I was.”

After weeks of this, his mother was permitted to visit again – and this time, Namazi was prepared. He says his guards warned him to say nothing of his mistreatment and flanked him as he entered the room. “Even before sitting, I say, ‘Hi, mom. These guys have been torturing me. I need you to go public on this.’” Recalling the moment today, Namazi is almost overcome by emotion. “I put her through a lot.”

During his eight years of captivity, Namazi saw other prisoners being released in deals between the US and Iran on three separate occasions – despite, he claims, the US government being fully aware of the torture and abuse he was suffering following correspondence between his parents and the State Department.

Feeling abandoned by his government, Namazi decided he faced a choice: he could either be patient and try to stay sane, trusting that the authorities would eventually negotiate a deal that secured his freedom; or he could fight.

“I think part of my reaction to the unutterable indignities was that I have to gain my own respect back for myself. I had to fight them.”

High-risk interview

“I fought every day, every single day,” Namazi says. “I had a program: I’d get up, it was organized, you know, think about how to be a pain in the ass.”

As the years went by, Namazi tried many things, including smuggling out an opinion piece for The New York Times and going on hunger strike. But, he says, “I basically got no love back.” More was needed. So Namazi suggested to his pro bono lawyer in the US, Jared Genser, that perhaps it was time to do an interview.

In the end, Namazi’s calculus was remarkably simple. If he did the interview, he might be beaten up and thrown back in solitary. “I knew I could live (with) that,” he says. But if he chose not to do the interview, and there was no deal to free him, he’d always wonder if it could’ve got him out.

Speaking to Amanpour today, he says, is a little less high-stakes. “It is such a joy to be talking to you and not worrying about someone dragging me to a solitary cell somewhere because of it,” he tells her.

As Amanpour brought the phone interview to an end, Namazi made one last request: to address Biden directly, appealing to him “to just do what’s necessary to end this nightmare and bring us home.”

Coming home

This “desperate measure” was one way that Namazi felt he could get attention and try to lend some urgency to the ongoing negotiations.

He sees it as a crucial lesson for anyone in a similar situation: “If you are taken as a hostage, you need to make noise.” This creates more “political value” for a US president to make what otherwise might be a “politically costly” deal to release someone, he believes.

In September 2023, Namazi was finally released along with four fellow dual nationals: Emad Shargi, Morad Tahbaz, and two other prisoners whose identities were not disclosed by officials at the time.

The unfreezing of Iranian assets under the deal prompted intense criticism from former President Donald Trump and his allies – despite Trump having agreed to two prisoner swap deals with Iran during his time in office. Before it was finalized, 26 Senate Republicans wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to argue that it set an “incredibly dangerous precedent.”

But Namazi says he knew that, without a deal, he wasn’t getting out – a point his interrogators made “extremely clear.”

“We have a duty to get out our people from foreign dungeons when they have done nothing,” he adds, and “unfortunately, we have to make distasteful deals to get out our people.”

More importantly, Namazi feels he is more aware than most of the nature of the Iranian regime.

“I’ll tell you something: no one is as angry, no one is as disgusted at the fact that the Islamic Republic, this horrible regime, profited from blighting my life, than me and the other hostages and our families.

“I spent 2,989 days in their dungeon… They have done things that I’m not able to tell my therapist yet, and I still, I can’t even speak about it… I am upset that they profited from this. But what other choice is there? Are you just going let an American rot?”

No debriefing

Safely back in America, Namazi is full of ideas for changing how the US deals with hostage diplomacy. He likens it to “a game of rugby. We need to stop playing political chess with it. It’s different.”

He argues that the West can do far more to deter this sort of hostage-taking, from cracking down on international money-laundering that funds the lavish lifestyles of autocrats and their cronies, to restricting the visas they receive when visiting the United Nations in New York.

And it’s not just an American problem: Evin Prison is “a dystopian United Nations of hostages,” Namazi says, with many countries’ citizens behind bars.

“We can upend this business model very quickly. We have to make it unprofitable,” he says.

Namazi believes he could offer more but says he was not debriefed by the US government on his many interactions with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

He also feels there was a notable lack of support structure once he arrived in the US.

In reflecting on the year since his release, Namazi’s focus returns to Biden.

Emotion in his voice, Namazi tells Amanpour that, eventually, he’d like to meet the man who freed him.

“I would really love to shake President Biden’s hand one day. I really would.”

An Iranian Grammy Award winner said on Monday he was pardoned from a three-year sentence for a song that became an anthem to the 2022 protests that rocked the country following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.

Shervin Hajipour, who received the first-ever Grammy for best song for social change in 2023, uploaded a video story on Instagram, looking overcome with emotion and saying: “A new order had been issued regarding amnesty, and it included my case which has been completely dismissed,” adding that he learned about the case dismissal on Sunday.

His song, “Baraye,” or “For” in English, begins with: “For dancing in the streets,” “for the fear we feel when we kiss.”

The lyrics list reasons posted online by young Iranians explaining why they had protested against Iran’s ruling theocracy, after Amini died for not wearing her mandated headscarf to the liking of security forces.

The protests quickly escalated into calls to overthrow Iran’s clerical rulers. A subsequent security crackdown killed more than 500 people, with more than 22,000 detained.

On Friday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, pardoned and commuted the sentences of 2,887 prisoners. It is unclear whether Hajipour’s case was part of the amnesty order.

Two months ago, Hajipour announced that he was ordered to head to prison to serve the sentence of three years and eight months that a court handed him in March.

He had already served some prison time but was out on bail in 2023 pending the court’s decision.

An American woman who went missing while on a hike on Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa, has died and her body has been recovered, authorities said on Monday.

The woman has been identified as a 20-year-old student from North Carolina named Brook Cheuvront.

Cheuvront was reported missing on Saturday after a tracking app she was using stopped updating and friends could not reach her, said SANParks spokesman JP Louw.

The management of SANParks, which manages Table Mountain and other national parks, said the cause of death was still unclear and an inquest into her death has been opened.

An initial search was conducted by rangers, wilderness search and rescue members, and trail runners until late Saturday evening when it was no longer practical to continue, said Louw.

An aircraft joined the search the next day and helped to locate the body.

South African authorities have urged people to avoid hiking on their own, suggesting it be done in groups of at least four people.

Tokyo, Japan (AP) — Japan said its warplanes used flares to warn a Russian reconnaissance aircraft to leave northern Japanese airspace on Monday.

Japanese Defense Minister Minoru Kihara told reporters that the Russian Il-38 plane breached Japan’s airspace above Rebun Island, just off the coast of the country’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido, for up to a minute in three instances, during its five-hour flight in the area.

It came a day after a joint fleet of Chinese and Russian warships sailed around Japanese northern coasts. Kihara said the airspace violation could be related to a joint military exercise that Russia and China announced earlier this month.

Japan scrambled an undisclosed number of F-15 and F-35 fighter jets, which used flares for the first time after the Russian aircraft apparently ignored their warnings, Kihara said.

“The airspace violation was extremely regrettable,” Kihara said. He said Japan “strongly protested” to Russia through diplomatic channels and demanded preventive measures.

“We will carry out our warning and surveillance operations as we pay close attention to their military activities,” he said.

Kihara said the use of flares was a legitimate response to airspace violation and “we plan to use it without hesitation.”

Japanese defense officials are highly concerned about growing military cooperation between the China and Russia, and China’s increasingly assertive activity around Japanese waters and airspace. It led Tokyo to significantly reinforce defenses of southwestern Japan, including remote islands that are considered key to Japan’s defense strategy in the region.

Earlier in September, Russian military aircraft flew around southern Japanese airspace. A Chinese Y-9 reconnaissance aircraft briefly violated Japan’s southern airspace in late August.

The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning, accompanied by two destroyers, sailed between Japan’s westernmost island of Yonaguni and nearby Iriomote, entering close to Japan’s waters.

According to Japan’s military, it scrambled jets nearly 669 times between April 2023 and March 2024, about 70% of the time against Chinese military aircraft, though that did not include airspace violations.

Japan and Russia are in a teritorial dispute over a group of Russian-held islands, which the former Soviet Union seized from Japan at the end of World War II. The feud has prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty formally ending their war hostilities.

Israel launched an intense barrage of airstrikes across swathes of Lebanon on Monday in what was the deadliest day for the country since at least the 2006 war fought between Israel and the powerful Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

Terror and despair gripped Lebanese residents as Israeli bombs killed at least 492 people, including dozens of children and wounded more than 1,600 others, authorities said, as residents fled their homes desperate to reach safety.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country is changing the “balance of power” on its northern front as its military said it struck 1,600 Hezbollah assets across Lebanon on Monday and has not ruled out the possibility of a ground invasion.

Several countries have warned the strikes increase the risk of a wider regional war and have called for urgent international pressure to de-escalate the situation. Despite the scale and intensity of Monday’s strikes, neither side is calling the current escalation a war.

Here’s what we know.

What happened?

On Monday, Israel intensified its air campaign on Hezbollah, launching “extensive strikes” targeting the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon. It marked the deadliest day of Israeli strikes in Lebanon since the 2006 war and hit multiple parts of the country, mainly in the southern and eastern parts of the country near Lebanon’s border with Syria and where the militant group has a strong presence.

Women, children and medics were among those killed and wounded, Lebanon’s health ministry said Monday. It is unclear how many of the casualties were civilians or Hezbollah militants, but many of the locations described by Israel as Hezbollah targets are also residential neighborhoods and villages.

Isarel said that among the Hezbollah targets were “cruise missiles” that had a reach of hundreds of kilometers, rockets, and explosive warheads, according to military spokesperson Daniel Hagari, who claimed the munitions were stored in civilian homes.

Residents began to flee their homes after their phones began pinging with text messages from Israel and calls from unknown numbers urging them to evacuate immediately. A popular Lebanese radio station said it was hacked and its broadcast interrupted by an Israeli evacuation warning. The Israeli military warned civilians to leave areas in which Hezbollah operates, such as those used to store weapons.

Residents said they had little time to flee to safety before the bombing started. One resident in the southern city of Tyre on the coast of Lebanon said he heard Israeli warplanes “raining” bombs near his home from 5 a.m. local time on Monday.

Classes in schools and universities were canceled across the country and some flights to and from Beirut were suspended. Many schools were closed to be used as shelters for those seeking refuge.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah said it fired multiple rocket barrages into northern Israel, targeting the Ramat David airbase, Meggido airfield, and the Amos base, all located in the vicinity of the town of Afula in northern Israel.

Were civilians targeted?

Israel said it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure, but video shows destruction of residential areas and the large death toll reflects the scale and intensity of the strikes.

The nearly 500 killed on Monday alone is roughly half the number of Lebanese killed throughout the entire 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

Israeli warplanes were also seen flying over different parts of the country late afternoon, including over Mount Lebanon where Hezbollah does not have a notable presence.

Lebanon’s representative to the United Nations General Assembly said there was a mass “exodus” of people fleeing. One Lebanese NGO said more than 100,000 people had been displaced.

Residents described seeing buildings collapse and towns being emptied, while images and video show roads blocked by heavy traffic in both directions as people try to flee. Reuters video  from the southern suburbs of Beirut showed debris from damaged buildings and shards of glass littering the ground.

“We have nowhere to go, we have nothing, Mohamed Hamayda, a Syrian man displaced from Deir al-Zahrani, told Agence France-Presse news agency.

Lebanon’s Health Minister Dr. Firass Abiad said convoys of vehicles evacuating people from areas under fire had been “targeted,” as had two ambulances, a fire truck and a medical center. Two first responders were killed, he added.

The Israeli military said it was trying to “mitigate the harm to Lebanese civilians as much as possible,” Hagari said. Netanyahu accused Hezbollah of long using civilians as human shields while aiming rockets at Israeli citizens.

Why is Israel attacking Lebanon?

Hezbollah and Israel have been in conflict for decades – but the two have ramped up their cross-border attacks on each other since last October, when Israel’s war in Gaza began following the Palestinian militant group Hamas’ deadly October 7 attack on Israel.

Hezbollah is part of a Tehran-led alliance spanning Yemen, Syria, Gaza, and Iraq that has attacked Israel and its allies since the war with Hamas began. The group has said it will continue striking Israeli targets as long as the war in Gaza goes on.

The increasing escalations have once again brought the region to the edge of an all-out war.

Last week, Hezbollah – one of the most powerful paramilitary forces in the region – was left reeling after a deadly twin attack by Israel, when pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members simultaneously exploded across the country. The attack was followed by an Israeli strike on a building in a densely populated southern Beirut, which killed at least 45 people including a top commander and other senior operatives, as well as women and children.

The following days saw some of the most intense exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah in almost a year of war in Gaza, as the Lebanese militant group fired projectiles deeper into Israeli territory than has previously been seen and Israel fired hundreds of projectiles into southern Lebanon.

It came as Israel made a new war objective to return diplaced residents to their homes near the northern border after being evacuated due to Hezbollah attacks.

Though weakened militarily and its secretive lines of communication exposed, Hezbollah’s second-in-command has declared “a new chapter” in the confrontations which he called “a battle without limits.”

Is Lebanon and Israel at war?

While the airstrikes, attacks and rhetoric from both Israel and Hezbollah suggest they are in open conflict, neither side is calling the current escalation a war.

The head of Israel’s military Herzi Halevi said it is “preparing for the next phases” and Netanyahu in a televised speech told the people of Lebanon that his country is not at war with them, but with Hezbollah.

There is a renewed effort from the international community to de-escalate the situation. Qatar, one of the key mediators in talks between Israel and Hamas, said the region is on the “brink of the abyss” and France has requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to address the strikes.

World leaders will be gathering in New York for the UN General Assembly this week and there are feverish efforts behind the scenes to convince Israel not to escalate further and launch a ground incursion into Lebanon.

Though the United States is Israel’s closest ally and biggest weapons supplier, a senior State Department official said the US and its partners are attempting to find a diplomatic solution.

Hurricane John struck Mexico’s southern coast on Monday night after rapidly strengthening into a major Category 3 storm, triggering warnings of ‘life-threatening’ floods and mudslides.

Packing maximum sustained winds of 120 mph (193 kph), the storm made landfall south-southwest of the city of Marquelia in Guerrero state at around 9:15 p.m. local time, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Just a day ago, the storm was pacing at 35 mph (56 kph), but it underwent two rapid intensifications in a 24-hour period, ramping up speed by more than three times.

“This heavy rainfall will likely cause significant and possibly catastrophic, life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides to the Mexican States of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and southeast Guerrero, particularly in areas near the coast,” the center said.

Oaxaca state is a popular tourist spot known for its beautiful landscapes and beaches.

Oaxaca’s governor said the state government had evacuated 3,000 people and set up 80 shelters, while authorities had suspended classes in several costal zones on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.

Businesses in Puerto Escondido, a tourist destination in the southern part of the state, have closed after authorities ordered the suspension of all work on the area’s main beaches, the news agency reported.

Ana Aldai, who works for a restaurant there, told AP she was “a little bit distressed” because notice from authorities came quickly.

“There was no opportunity to make the necessary purchases,” she said.

Torrential rainfall of 10 to 20 inches, with isolated totals near 30 inches, could pummel areas along the Oaxaca coast to southeast Guerrero until Thursday.

The coastal areas of Chiapas are also expected to be hit by rainfall of six to 12 inches, with isolated totals around 15 inches, during the same period.

The rainfall could cause a life-threatening storm surge, producing significant coastal flooding near the landfall location, the National Hurricane Center said.

The surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves in coastal areas, it added.