For nearly six years, American conservationist Morad Tahbaz lived in what he described as hell inside Iran’s prison system. The worst four months were spent completely alone in a small cell, beneath a bright light that never went dark.

Tahbaz was held in Ward 2A of Iran’s Evin Prison, which he described as a high-security detention facility controlled by the intelligence branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

He was allowed out only twice a day for about 10 minutes and was forced to wear a blindfold whenever he left, Tahbaz told Fox News Digital. His weekly call with his wife lasted only a few minutes and was monitored so closely that an official interrupted whenever he spoke in English.

«This is probably the harshest and toughest imprisonment that any prisoner will go through,» Tahbaz, who was finally released in September 2023, told Fox News Digital of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence detention facility inside Iran’s Evin Prison.

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Tahbaz was living and working in Iran as a conservationist when authorities arrested him alongside several colleagues in January 2018. He had co-founded the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, which worked to protect endangered species including the Asiatic cheetah and Persian leopard.

One of the accusations leveled against him, Tahbaz said, was that he had trained lizards to spy on Iranian military installations for Israel.

«You can’t make this stuff up,» Tahbaz said in the Zoom interview with Fox News Digital. «It just gives you an idea of the kind of narrative that this regime comes up with. They’ll come up with anything.»

What began with interrogations in January 2018 turned into nearly six years of imprisonment for the Iranian American conservationist.

Now free and back in his home in the U.S., Tahbaz fears the war between the United States and Iran could make the Americans still held by Iran both more vulnerable and more valuable as negotiating assets.

«I do think the strikes in Iran will have an impact on the hostages’ situation and their circumstances,» he said.

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Morad Tahbaz reunites with his family following his release from Iran in September 2023. (Morad Tahnaz)

Tahbaz said he spent his first two years inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence facility at Evin.

After his conviction, Tahbaz was transferred into the general prison population. He said his cellmates ranged from suspected ISIS members to former Iranian government ministers.

The isolation and physical conditions were accompanied by constant uncertainty.

«The uncertainty when you are a hostage is not like you think at the end of your sentence they’ll necessarily let you go,» Tahbaz said. «They’ll just come up with another charge to keep you there for as long as you’re of value to them.»

Tahbaz was released Sept. 18, 2023, with four other Americans in a Qatar-mediated agreement between Washington and Iran. The exchange also involved five Iranians held by the United States and the transfer of $6 billion in previously frozen Iranian funds into a restricted account for humanitarian transactions.

The negotiation brought Tahbaz home, but he believes Western governments have failed to establish consequences strong enough to stop Iran from detaining more foreign and dual nationals.

«This business of hostage-taking has been going on essentially since the beginning of the revolution,» he said.

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Freed hostage Morad Tahbaz surrounded by his family just after landing in the U.S., September 2023. (Morad Tahbaz)

«It will continue, in my opinion, as long as there is no deterrence,» Tahbaz added. «None of the Western governments, in reality, have done anything significant about stopping this practice.»

The issue returned to the forefront in July with the release of Dena Karari, a 53-year-old Iranian American from California.

Karari had been unable to leave Iran since December 2024 after authorities confiscated her passports. Her attorney said she faced allegations of espionage and collaboration with a hostile state. President Donald Trump announced in July that she had been allowed to leave and called the decision a «gesture of goodwill.»

Karari was not continuously imprisoned, according to reporting about her case, but she remained under an exit ban and was repeatedly interrogated.

Her release offered relief during a widening conflict, but Tahbaz said dual nationals remain particularly vulnerable because Iran does not recognize their foreign citizenship.

«Iran doesn’t recognize any other nationality other than the Iranian,» he said.

Authorities can develop a national-security case, secure a sentence and then preserve the prisoner for use in future negotiations, Tahbaz said.

«You’re condemned and they pass sentence and you’re in the system, and now you are a bargaining chip,» he said.

The precise number of Americans currently imprisoned or prevented from leaving Iran remains unclear.

Reuters reported in March that at least six U.S. citizens or permanent residents were detained in Iran, including journalist Reza Valizadeh, businessman Kamran Hekmati and U.S. permanent resident Shahab Dalili.

Valizadeh, a former Radio Farda journalist, was sentenced to 10 years for allegedly collaborating with a hostile government. Hekmati was sentenced to two years for having visited Israel more than a decade earlier, according to his family. Dalili, who was arrested after traveling to Iran for his father’s funeral, was sentenced to 10 years for allegedly cooperating with a hostile government.

Advocates warned that escalating strikes could increase the risk that detainees would be harmed or used as leverage.

The State Department formally designated Hekmati, who has bladder cancer, as wrongfully detained in March.

Tahbaz said he believes three Americans remain in custody, although that number could not be independently confirmed. Some cases are deliberately kept private because families fear publicity could increase the danger to detainees.

His concerns about the current war are rooted in how Iranian interrogators responded to tensions with Washington during his own imprisonment.

«When I was taken in in January of 2018, and it was right at the beginning of the first Trump administration, the amount of frustration and anger at the rollback of the JCPOA at that time, I mean, it was thrown into my face just about every day of my interrogation in some way, shape or form,» Tahbaz said, referring to a 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. 

The United States formally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in May 2018, several months after Tahbaz’s arrest.

Tahbaz believes the current conflict could similarly be transferred onto prisoners who have no control over decisions made in Washington.

«It definitely will worsen the case of prisoners in custody and those who may be just under surveillance or potential hostages,» he said.

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Morad Tahbaz with Eskandar Firouz, the founding head of Iran’s Department of the Environment, at Lar National Park in Iran. Firouz, who was imprisoned for six years following the 1979 revolution, died several years after the photo was taken. (Morad Tahbaz)

He described prisoners as one more source of leverage in Iran’s broader confrontation with the United States.

«You’re seeing that playing out even with the war, this tit for tat, you do this, we’ll do that,» he said.

«The hostages are, you know, just a commodity from Iran’s perspective, to be used at the right time.»

Tahbaz’s experience with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also shapes his analysis of the struggle unfolding inside Iran.

He stressed that he is not a political analyst and described his conclusions as personal assessments based on his experience and conversations with contacts familiar with the country.

Tahbaz said he believes competing interests within the Revolutionary Guard are fighting to preserve their political and economic power.

He pointed specifically to Khatam al-Anbiya, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ engineering and construction conglomerate. Tahbaz argued that sanctions have benefited powerful IRGC-linked entities by forcing oil sales, imports and money transfers into opaque black and gray markets.

«They have created a huge franchise for themselves because of these sanctions,» he said.

«They don’t want to see the sanctions go away, because they will lose their franchise, if you will. They will lose their power, their control over the money and everything that goes along with it.»

He said ordinary Iranians have suffered most from the resulting economic isolation and wartime conditions.

«The people who are hurt most by all of this are the people of Iran,» Tahbaz said. «They’re unfortunately taking the brunt of all of these in their daily lives.»

Tahbaz predicted Iranians would eventually return to the streets, but said many had lost confidence that Western governments would intervene to help remove the regime.

«I’m sure they’ll be back on the streets,» he said. «But I think this notion that the Western states are going to step in and help them overthrow this regime, that went out the window.»

Tahbaz said many Iranians had previously been strongly sympathetic toward the United States and initially hoped the conflict might end the Islamic Republic. That characterization reflects his assessment and conversations and could not be independently quantified.

He believes any future political movement will have to develop primarily inside Iran rather than being directed by opposition groups abroad.

«There’s a lot of hatred and anger just boiling there,» Tahbaz said. «So it will boil up and over again without a doubt. The question is when, how, but it will happen again.»

Tahbaz is recounting his imprisonment in his new book, «Green Parrots: A Memoir of Survival in Iran’s Evin Prison,» scheduled for publication Sept. 29. The publisher says the book describes how he relied on skills developed while tracking endangered wildlife to survive nearly six years in Evin, including solitary confinement.

His release illustrates the contradiction confronting governments trying to recover their citizens: negotiations can bring individual prisoners home, but Tahbaz believes the broader practice will continue unless Iran faces meaningful deterrence for taking them.

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Military members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in western Tehran, Iran (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

He survived because governments ultimately negotiated for his freedom.

His warning is that as the war intensifies, the Americans still held in Iran could become more valuable to Tehran at precisely the moment their circumstances become more dangerous.

Costa Rica fue incluida entre los 10 mejores destinos para que la Generación Z viaje en 2026, de acuerdo con una selección publicada por la revista especializada Travel + Leisure. El país destaca por ofrecer una combinación de aventura, naturaleza y descanso, características que, según expertos en turismo, responden a las nuevas preferencias de los viajeros jóvenes.

La publicación señala que los integrantes de la Generación Z (nacidos entre 1997 y 2012) están dejando atrás los destinos más populares en redes sociales para buscar experiencias auténticas, lugares menos concurridos y mayor contacto con la cultura y la naturaleza.

Según el informe What the Future Report 2026, de la plataforma Kayak, el 69 % de los viajeros de esta generación quiere conocer destinos completamente nuevos, mientras que el 84 % prefiere visitar zonas rurales o ciudades pequeñas en lugar de los grandes centros turísticos.

Para elaborar el listado, Travel + Leisure consultó a especialistas del sector turístico, entre ellos Tara Cappel, fundadora de FTLO Travel, empresa que organiza viajes grupales para personas de entre 25 y 39 años.

“Costa Rica es la combinación perfecta entre una aventura en la selva y unas vacaciones relajadas frente al mar”, afirmó Cappel al explicar por qué el país forma parte de la clasificación.

La experta destacó que el territorio costarricense ofrece una amplia variedad de experiencias en distancias relativamente cortas. Entre ellas mencionó la posibilidad de recorrer el volcán Arenal, caminar por los bosques nubosos de Monteverde y observar especies como monos, perezosos e iguanas en el Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio.

En la costa del Pacífico también recomendó destinos como Nosara para practicar surf, las playas de Santa Teresa para quienes buscan un ambiente relajado, Tamarindo para disfrutar de los atardeceres y la Península Papagayo para quienes prefieren hospedarse en complejos turísticos de lujo.

El artículo destaca que este tipo de experiencias conectan con una tendencia creciente entre los viajeros jóvenes, quienes priorizan las actividades al aire libre, el turismo sostenible y el contacto con comunidades locales por encima de los itinerarios tradicionales.

La publicación también señala que, aunque los clásicos viajes de verano por Europa continúan siendo populares, cada vez más jóvenes buscan lugares menos saturados por el turismo masivo y con propuestas diferentes.

En ese contexto, Costa Rica comparte el listado con destinos de América, Europa, Asia y África que ofrecen experiencias auténticas y alejadas de las multitudes.

Los diez destinos recomendados por Travel + Leisure para la Generación Z son:

• Dominica.
• Belice.
• Marruecos.
• Austin, Texas (Estados Unidos).
• Vietnam.
• Cerdeña, Italia.
• La Paz, México.
• Costa Rica.
• Hilo, Hawái (Estados Unidos).
• Punta Gorda, Florida (Estados Unidos).

Además de Costa Rica, la revista destacó a Belice por su barrera de coral y ruinas mayas; Vietnam por su gastronomía, historia y paisajes; Marruecos por sus ciudades, mercados y experiencias culturales; y Cerdeña por sus playas y menor afluencia de turistas en comparación con otros destinos italianos.

Los expertos consultados coinciden en que la Generación Z busca viajes que les permitan vivir experiencias únicas, descubrir lugares poco conocidos y alejarse de los circuitos turísticos tradicionales.

La tendencia también responde a un mayor interés por destinos donde sea posible combinar aventura, bienestar, naturaleza y cultura, además de opciones que resulten más accesibles económicamente.

En ese escenario, Costa Rica continúa consolidándose como uno de los destinos preferidos para el turismo de naturaleza, gracias a su biodiversidad, parques nacionales, playas y actividades al aire libre, elementos que la revista considera especialmente atractivos para los viajeros jóvenes que buscan experiencias memorables más allá de los destinos más populares del mundo.

Two races in politically disparate parts of the country set the stage for one of the most unusual split-screen election days of the year on Tuesday.

Rep. David Scott’s death in April at age 80 created a vacancy in a heavily blue district encompassing the southern and eastern Atlanta suburbs of Stockbridge, Conyers and Snellville.

With the general election ballot already decided, Tuesday’s contest will determine who will finish out Scott’s term. Scott was notably related by marriage to Braves slugger Hank Aaron.

Across the country in South Dakota, Republicans vying for the Mount Rushmore State’s safely red governor’s seat have created the state’s first gubernatorial runoff between incumbent Gov. Larry Rhoden and self-made millionaire bitcoin investor Toby Doeden.

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Rhoden originally took the reins in Pierre after President Donald Trump chose former Gov. Kristi Noem to be Homeland Security secretary in his second term. He was unable to garner enough support in the June primary to secure the nomination outright in his first statewide election as governor.

South Dakota’s runoff is expected to be a classic establishment-versus-outsider race, with Rhoden heavily favored in the polls but Doeden hoping for a Sioux Falls-fueled upset.

Minnehaha County, home to Sioux Falls, is a key county to watch Tuesday after helping propel Doeden to a first-place finish in the June primary.

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South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden speaks with the press during Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s «Returning Education to the States» tour on April 8, 2026, at McCrossan Boys Ranch in Sioux Falls, S.D. (Samantha Laurey / Argus Leader / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)

Pennington County, on the state’s western side, will also be closely watched after contributing to Doeden’s top finish in June.

In contrast to what is expected in Scott’s district in November, Republicans are heavily favored because South Dakota has not elected a Democratic governor since the 1970s.

Then-Gov. Richard Kneip served nearly two terms before President Jimmy Carter nominated him as ambassador to Singapore. Gov. Harvey Wollman completed the final six months of Kneip’s term, and is the state’s last Democrat to hold the office.

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Shifting back to the Deep South, Georgia Democrats are expected to hold Scott’s seat in the fall by a wide margin.

Efforts to replace Scott grew in recent months, particularly among the party’s progressive wing, as the 12-term, often-combative lawmaker drew increasing frustration from Democrats.

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A sign welcomes travelers to the Peach State at the I-20 East Welcome Center near Tallapoosa, Georgia, on October 3, 2022. (Charlie Creitz)

Last year, Scott made waves in Washington media when he shouted expletives at a Politico photographer as he was wheeled through the Capitol by staff.

«Who gave you the right to take my picture, a—hole,» Scott shouted at photographer Francis Chung in late 2025.

That demeanor was similar to what led Everton Blair to launch his primary bid against Scott, in what his campaign page calls a «voice for a new generation.»

Blair previously told Fox News Digital it was a run-in with Scott at a Gwinnett County town hall, where the lawmaker gave insufficient answers to questions and then reportedly became confrontational, that led him to explore a bid.

Blair had said he would «love to just hear a little bit more of the congressional and legislative strategy, congressman, that you have for this administration, particularly as it pertains to safeguarding federal funds,» according to Semafor, when Scott replied «hold on,» before becoming agitated:

«I don’t know who sent y’all, but we got these folks here who are providing answers. And I’m doing this. That’s what I’m doing,» Scott said, according to the outlet.

Blair responded by launching a primary bid, while remarking to Fox News Digital at the time that two other elderly Democratic members had recently died in office «at a time when every vote counts.»

The wave of millennial candidates seeking to replace aging Democrats was at the time dubbed the «Biden effect» — Democratic lawmakers retiring or facing potential primary challenges following the octogenarian Delawarean’s disastrous debate performance, which led to his decision to step aside for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

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«Change can’t wait, and Democrats need a new bench of leaders who are committed to solving real problems for working people,» Blair said in a previous press release.

Meanwhile, Scott’s daughter is hoping to replace her late father in Congress, remarking that she wants to continue his legacy.

«That is my thing, is to finish out his year strongly, make sure that this money gets down to the district, and just make sure the 13th district is taken care of, constituency-wise, and making sure the projects go into finalization,» she told the Georgia Recorder, while adding she would retain her father’s staff locally and at the Capitol for added stability.

«[W]hen he first got into politics, I wasn’t even born, so I ran for some type of office or campaign every two years of my life, so this is just my norm, I’m just picking up where we left off with him,» she told the outlet.

A third candidate, former Mississippi judge Carlos Moore, also criticized Rep. Scott’s tenure, telling the Mississippi Free Press he wants to be a «leader who actually shows up.»

Moore had been suspended from the bench for one year in 2024 after a bar tribunal found he mishandled a wrongful death settlement, according to the outlet.

When asked by the press about the infraction, he pointed to Trump’s 34-count indictment in New York. He also pledged, if elected, to be a leader who understands «how to defend our democracy and Constitution» from the president.

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The winner of Tuesday’s special elections will serve only until January.

Georgia state Rep. Jasmine Clark, D-Tucker, won the Democratic nomination for the full term earlier this year and is heavily favored against Republican Air Force veteran Jonathan Chavez in November. Trump lost the district by about 43 points in 2024.