Americans freed from Iran prison feared they had been left to 'rot Here are their stories.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : "Morad Tahbaz, 67, is a citizen of three countries: the U.S., Iran and Britain.
53% : "All I want, sir, is one minute of your day's time for the next seven days devoted to thinking about the tribulations of the U.S. hostages in Iran," he wrote in a letter shared by his lawyer.
51% : "For almost eight years I have been dreaming of this day," Namazi said in a statement after he and four other Americans were freed in a prisoner-swap with Iran.
51% : Tehran topped both off their lists.
51% : But his newfound optimism about how welcoming Iran had become wouldn't last long.
48% : After 2,898 days of captivity in Iran, Siamak Namazi was desperate to feel the warm sun on his face, lay back in the grass, and look up at the blue sky.
46% : ""These Americans are now free after having endured something that I think most of us can't possibly imagine," said Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
45% : Here are three of their stories:Siamak Namazi, 52, the longest-held American prisoner in Iran, is an Iranian-American businessman.
45% : His daughter told Reuters in April he has prostate cancer"For 4 years the Iranian government has held Morad Tahbaz -- a UK and U.S. citizen -- in Evin Prison," Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran, said on X, formerly Twitter, earlier this year.
44% : He was arrested in October 2015 while visiting his family in Tehran.
44% : Emad Shargi, 59, who spent five and half years in Iranian custody, was born in Iran, but emigrated to the United States as a child.
44% : He has two daughters and his wife, Bahareh Amidi Shargi, who also left Iran for the U.S. as a child after that's country's 1979 Islamic Revolution.
44% : "My family is so happy to hear that Emad is no longer in Iran and is on his way home.
43% : In 1998, he founded a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm focused on the risks of doing business in Iran, according to the organization.
43% : But he wasn't given his passport back, so he couldn't leave Iran.
43% : Iran should release him."
42% : When his father, Baquer Namazi, a retired UNICEF official, traveled to Iran in 2016 to help free his son, he was also arrested.
42% : Tahbaz was one of eight conservationists affiliated with the Tehran-based Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation who were arrested in Iran in 2018 while doing field work in the country.
41% : He was detained at his home in Tehran by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards in 2018, initially on spying charges.
41% : One of the projects the foundation was working on at the time of their arrest was to monitor the endangered Asiatic cheetah, which lives predominantly in Iran, according to the organization's website.
40% : He was then detained again while trying to flee Iran by escaping into northern Iraq.
37% : Five Americans will return United States as part of a deal with Iran ahead of the UN General Assembly.
37% : All had been accused - falsely, according to the White House - of being spies or working on behalf of the U.S. Government in Iran.
35% : Thank you!"Namazi, who came to the United States with his family in 1983, became a U.S. citizen in 1993, according to United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit organization that includes many former U.S. and foreign government security officials.
29% : It was the same year that the Obama administration entered into a nuclear deal with Iran and several world powers.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.