Washington D.C. – New Yorker, Mar. 24, 2026
If, by chance, you know my story, you will understand why I’m spending my days fixated on the fast-changing news and the terrible images from Iran. I am an Iranian American, a citizen of both countries, the son of a rug merchant from Mashhad, a city in the northeast that is home to three and a half million people and to the holiest site in the country. In January, Mashhad was the scene of immense anti-regime protests. Now many of those protesters—the ones who survived the Islamic Republic’s violent backlash—are in prison, and the city is under bombardment.
For a long time, Iran was home. In 2001, while living in California, I started making periodic trips, and, in 2009, I fulfilled a dream by moving to Tehran, where I worked as a foreign correspondent, mainly for the Washington Post. In Tehran, I met and married an Iranian reporter, Yeganeh, and, for years, we did our work the best we could within one of the world’s most restrictive media landscapes. Over years of interviewing, we met countless people who dreamed of a day when the regime might give way to a more humane government, perhaps even a democratic one.
In July, 2014, at the height of negotiations between the Islamic Republic and world powers over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, my wife and I were arrested and thrown into Evin Prison, a notorious facility known throughout Iran for its cruelty. She was never charged with a crime, and was released after seventy-two days. I was charged with espionage and became the latest American hostage of a regime that has never hesitated to use innocent people as bargaining chips. (There are currently at least six Americans wrongfully detained in Iran.)
After a year and a half in Evin, an experience that I describe in my memoir, I was released and immediately transported back to the U.S., with Yeganeh. We left behind many family members and countless friends. Now, as I follow the war—through telephone calls, WhatsApp and Signal messages, social-media D.M.s, and cable news—I am both here, living in the suburbs of Washington, and there, in a home we never properly said goodbye to. The reports I get arrive sporadically and without warning, and they describe the chaos and the destruction with a nonchalance that is unsettling.
During the first week of the war, I had not connected directly with anyone inside Iran until I saw an Instagram Story posted by a young relative in Tehran. Our grandmothers were sisters. He and his parents were our first family members to move from Mashhad to the capital. Their home, in northern Tehran, was the first one I ever visited in the country, a large flat on the top floor of a multi-unit building, with a view of the sprawling city below. When we first met, he was seven, precocious and always smiling. The image he shared, which I viewed just seconds after he posted it, was of an exploding building in the distance—I recognized the view—over which he had written, “Why won’t it end?”
