As the mothers of Shane Bauer, 27, Sarah Shourd, 31, and Josh Fattal, 27, have spent the last year pacing up and down in the private hell of not knowing whether they will ever see their children again, the Iranians who are detaining the ostensibly luckless hikers have dickered around, threatened and thrown out small bones of hope. Their latest: they plan to release one — just one, and we don’t know which — of the Americans on the Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, as a traditional gesture of faith and good will. This is to take place on Saturday, according to reports today.
While the news is not unwelcome, it will be painfully difficult for the mothers of the two detainees left behind. But if it has to be one, no doubt they are hoping it’s Sarah, who has told her mother in fleeting phone calls that she is ill — apparently, a breast lump and precancerous cervical cells — but her Iranian captors will not give her access to medical treatment. She has been in solitary confinement, while the men are sharing a cell, according to reports. The three have been accused of entering Iran with the intention of spying, though they have insisted they were captured in Iraqi Kurdistan near the border, and never had any intention of going into Iran. They were taken in July 2009.
It is clear they are pawns in a much greater battle of wills between the Iranian regime and the American government, which has succeeded in the last year to impose greater sanctions on Iran and is seeking even more over the Persians’ alleged nuclear weapons program. But to engage in this kind of revenge on three young people who by all reports have spent much of the last several years working in underdeveloped regions and learning about and working for social justice in the Muslim world, is the height of perversity.
On a side note, Bauer is a great and sensitive writer who shed amazing light on the Iraqi Special Forces (brought to you by America’s finest) just before he was jailed. “Iraq’s New Death Squad” is an important read and probably didn’t make him many friends within the military either. Our own Scott Horton interviewed Bauer in June 2009 — you can listen here.
