A Hostage-Taker Dies in Iran and Other Coronavirus Stories

By Robin Wright

Hossein Sheikholeslam spent years studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, before he returned to Iran, in 1979, to join the revolution and participate in the takeover of the U.S. Embassy. “I was there all four hundred and forty-four days,” he recalled, the last time I saw him, in Tehran, in 2015. “I helped put together and translate the classified cables that the Americans had shredded.” He went on to become a member of parliament, the Ambassador to Syria, and the deputy foreign minister. He was one of the leading figures in Iran’s attempt to export its revolutionary ideology. He had been in Syria and Lebanon days before a suicide bomber drove into the barracks of U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Beirut, in 1983. In 2015, we had a painfully long argument about why the regime still rallied its followers to shout “Death to America” at public events more than three decades later. Sheikholeslam, who by then had a silvery beard and six children, had been nicknamed Gap Tooth by the hostages, for obvious reasons. I asked him if he knew that. He grinned wide enough to show me that the gap was gone. “It’s artificial,” he said, tapping his front teeth. Sheikholeslam died, on Thursday, of covid-19, which is caused by the new coronavirus. He was the latest in a growing list of Iranian officials to be felled by the disease. Eight per cent of Iran’s parliament has been infected; two members have died.

In just the past two weeks, the number of covid-19 cases in Iran has soared to more than forty-seven hundred—up more than a thousand in just a day. In Qom, the holy city that is the epicenter of the outbreak, the cemetery has been unable to keep up with the number of deaths. On Wednesday, the BBC Persian Service posted a cell-phone video showing row after row of black body bags awaiting burial in Qom. Other videos show men wearing hazmat suits lowering shrouded bodies into the ground.

Iran is one of the epicenters of the global disease that, as of Friday morning, had infected more than a hundred thousand and killed more than thirty-four hundred globally.  Read on....

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