When news broke of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, it had been 2,173 days since her arrest at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport on April 3, 2016. Every day since, her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, has been counting. At this morning’s conference Nazanin said that her freedom felt like “too much to absorb...I sometimes ask myself, is it real? Or is it part of the nightmare/ dreams I was having for such a long time?” Ratcliffe looked on as if he too could barely believe it.
When I first interviewed Richard in a car park outside the Iranian Embassy in 2017, he told me quite matter-of-factly, that it had been 544 days since he’d seen his wife and child (at this point, their daughter Gabriella was also detained in Iran). There was something in his precise tallying that gave Richard a degree of certitude in spite of what he called “the craziness” that had been their story so far. That evening all those years ago, I watched as Free Nazanin campaigners tied yellow balloons to a nearby tree, the autumn light fading into dusk. “She made this,” he said quietly, reaching into a pocket and pulling out a small woodblock carving, revealing two figures cradling their child, the mother’s hair wrapped around them like a great wave. “That’s me, that’s her — and that’s Gabriella,” he smiled. Nazanin had made it for Father’s Day.
