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PRINCETON, N.J. (Reuters) - By the time Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang arrived in Iran to conduct research for his doctorate in history, he had already spent years living and working in politically turbulent countries.

The Chinese-born U.S. citizen previously worked as a Pashto translator for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan and spent time in Uzbekistan while a student at Harvard University.

Wang, 37, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on spying charges after his arrest last summer, an Iranian official said on Sunday. He is the latest American citizen to face jail in Iran for what the U.S. State Department has denounced as fabricated charges.

His sentencing shocked his colleagues at Princeton, who described him in interviews as a quiet but collegial scholar whose intellectual curiosity stood out even at the elite school in New Jersey.

Wang is married and has a 4-year-old son. In addition to Pashto, English and his native Mandarin, Wang is also proficient in Russian and Turkish and was learning Persian in Iran.

His wife, Hua Qu, said in a statement on Tuesday that her husband "has been unjustly imprisoned for espionage that I know he did not and never would commit."

"We fervently hope that the Iranian authorities will release him soon so that he can return home to his young family," she added.

University President Chris Eisgruber said in a letter to the school on Monday that Princeton had kept his arrest confidential on the recommendation of advisers inside and outside of government.

Wang, a history student at Princeton since 2013, was conducting field work for his dissertation, which is focused on how Muslim regions are governed.

Iran accused him of scanning 4,500 pages of digital documents. His academic adviser, history Professor Stephen Kotkin, and fellow graduate students said in interviews that scanning historical documents the ones Wang was studying were a century old, Kotkin said for later review is a common practice for researchers.

Kotkin said Wang was pursuing a "very ambitious" dissertation plan that included on-site research in Iran, Russia and potentially Afghanistan.

"He's one of these kids who lives for research and ideas," Kotkin said.

Several history graduate students described Wang as a respected scholar but declined to go into detail, citing the sensitivity of the case. The history department's chairman, Keith Wailoo, emailed students on Monday asking them to refer news media inquiries to the school's communications office.

One student and friend of Wang's, who requested anonymity after Wailoo's email, said Wang was "very driven" to succeed, working hard to learn Persian to read source material in its original form.

An official at Iran's interests section in Washington, the country's de facto diplomatic outpost in the U.S. capital, declined to comment in detail on Wang's case, referring questions to Iran's United Nations mission, which did not respond to a request for comment.

After high school in Beijing, Wang studied in China and India before moving to the United States, according to a lecture he gave years ago.

He graduated from the University of Washington in 2006 and earned a master's degree at Harvard University, where he traveled to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for research.

In 2008-09, Wang worked at a law firm in Hong Kong through Princeton in Asia, a program that arranges fellowships in Asia for U.S. residents.

"For better or worse, he still can't tell you what exactly he has been studying in the many years that have passed," a biographical note on Princeton in Asia's website said. "What he does know is that his dream is to walk the ancient Silk Road from Xi'an to Rome one day."

Reporting by Joseph Ax; Additional reporting by Yeganeh Torbati in Washington and Ethan Lou in Calgary; Editing by Jonathan Oatis

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US student imprisoned in Iran is scholar, not spy: colleagues - Reuters

President Donald Trumps decision on Monday to certify that Iran is still abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action a decision that prevents the reimposition of U.S. proliferation-related sanctions on Iran would seem to be good news for supporters of the nuclear agreement. However, stories that Trump spent an hour arguing with his entire national security team about whether to certify and only reluctantly agreed to continue the nuclear agreement should be of grave concern. Indeed, Trumps behavior and the administrations insistence on coupling every certification with over the top, belligerent rhetoric may be setting the United States up to walk away from the nuclear agreement on the worst terms possible.

The first problem is that in the event Trump decides to leave the agreement, the blame game will be critical. If the United States is blamed for the collapse by its P5+1 partners (Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia) and other key international actors, sanctions will be nearly impossible to reimplement. Many of Americas partners will continue to engage with Iran economically and call our bluff, daring the United States to sanction them. The end result will be an Iran that is no longer constrained by the nuclear obligations of the deal but is not under severe economic pressure.

At every turn, the administration has made absolutely clear that it does not like the nuclear agreement, believes it was a bad deal, and is signaling a desire to abandon it. This approach, combined with the overall negative perception of Trump across the globe, means that in almost any scenario he will be blamed for the collapse of the agreement. It is hard to imagine a scenario in which the Trump administration would be able to reimplement sanctions. Even if Iran were caught cheating red-handed, the intelligence would likely be disputed. And with the administration facing such a trust deficit globally, specifically on this issue, it is hard to see how the United States could come out of the situation in a strong position.

But even as the United States signals to the world that it may walk away from the deal, the message to Iran is that the United States will talk tough but not really take meaningful steps to counter the Islamic Republic in the region. That is because the tough talk has run into the reality that the Middle East is incredibly complicated and that there is little support in the United States for new, major military adventures. In Islamic State-controlled eastern Syria, the administration has hotly debated whether to compete militarily not just with the Islamic State, but also with Iran. And it appears that the more cautious Pentagon approach may be prevailing over the more aggressive strategy being pushed by the National Security Council.

Meanwhile, Jordan, Russia, and the United States earlier this month agreed to a ceasefire in southwest Syria. Trump has touted this breakthrough as a major success. But in recent days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come out against the agreement, arguing that it is too friendly to Iran and could allow Iran and its allies in Syria to establish a base on Israels border. The text of the agreement has not been shared publicly, so it is hard to know where the precise problem lies. But it seems most likely that this is a case in which the United States is willing to accept more risk to cut an agreement that it believes is in its interests and Israels, while the Israelis take a more absolutist position about their security. Indeed, this dynamic is quite similar to the years-long disagreements over the nuclear deal though Israels supporters in Washington do not seem to be going after Trump for this approach with nearly the same vigor that they did when President Barack Obama and Netanyahu had similar disputes.

These policy decisions in Syria may be the right ones. But if they are, why does the administration persist in its over-the-top rhetoric and threats toward Iran? All the administration is doing is demonstrating to Iran and to U.S. regional partners that the United States is all talk no action, which will weaken its hand on Iran policy overall, and especially in a scenario in which the nuclear deal collapses and Iran considers restarting its program.

It is hard to explain why the administration is pursuing these incoherent and contradictory steps. What appears to be driving it is a similar dynamic to what we see with healthcare. The American public has moved on from both the healthcare debate and the Iran debate. It is ready to focus on new issues. But Trump has no clear agenda or policies of his own, and in their absence he is simply trying to tear down Obamas key domestic and foreign policy achievements, with little understanding or care for what might replace them. On Tuesday, he failed quite spectacularly on both fronts. But he is going to keep trying and unfortunately, on Iran, as opposed to healthcare, he does not need Congresss help to bring down the policy.

Photo credit:ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

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Trump's Incoherent Iran Policy Could End the Nuke Deal on the Worst Possible Terms - Foreign Policy (blog)

News of the death of the young Iranian-American mathematics genius Maryam Mirzakhani on Saturday shocked many in Iran and around the globe.

It had only been days earlier that the world learned the 40-year-old was suffering from breast cancer. Photographs of Mirzakhani were shared everywhere, on social networks and in Iranian and foreign media, alongside celebrations of her accomplishments, including being the only Iranian and the only woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics. For hours, her death remained one of the most trending news items in the world.

But when it came to Irans domestic media, a certain amount of emphasis was put on making sure Mirzakhanis head was covered, which is mandatory under Iranian law.

When Mirzakhani won the Fields Medaloften referred to as the Nobel Prize for Mathematicsin the summer of 2014, she got the same treatment from Irans media. Despite the fact that she was recognized for her outstanding contribution to building knowledge and understanding of the dynamics and the geometry of curved surfaces, the media chose to reduce these achievements to whether or not she was wearing hijab.

Now, theyve done it again. Each newspaper and website found its own way of handling photographs of Mirzakhani, sometimes with a little help from PhotoShop. In one paper, her hair has been lost among the series of numbers and equations on the blackboard behind her. Other publications chose to darken the background so her hair would not stand out.

Reformist newspapers Shargh and Etemad used a drawing to forestall inevitable attacks by the official or unofficial guardians of public morality. Others cropped photos so only her face would show. Then, of course, there were those papers, like Javan and Khorasan, which somehow found photographs of the younger Mirzakhani wearing proper hijab.

Unexpectedly, though, there were a few papers that dared to show her as she really looked and how all recent photographs showed herwithout a hijab. Hamshahri and Donya-e Eghtesad were among them. The papers may well get into trouble later, but for now, they are being rewarded for the move, with thousands of people praising them online for their defiance. And in their own defiance, Iranians and non-Iranians alike shared one photograph more than most. Its the photograph used on the Stanford website, and seen in the Guardian and the New York Times and many other websites and newspapers: Mirzakhanis hair is uncovered and short, and she is looking straight into the camera.

Challenge to the Official Line on Hijab

One surprising infraction was committed by the semi-official Fars News Agency. It tweeted the news of Mirzakhanis death alongside a photograph of her not wearing hijab. The move led to sarcastic responses from some readers. Hope your prayers will not be quashed, wrote one observer called Sam. You published a picture of her without hijab! But others thanked Fars. You published a picture that corresponds to the beliefs of the late Maryam Mirzakhani, was one response.

The situation bears resemblance to what happened in 2014. There were a few newspapers and sites that dared to make the hijab mistake. Again, there was sarcasm: So hijab is a relative thing? tweeted one critic called Saeed. When newspapers publish pictures of Maryam Mirzakhani with hijab, while websites post pictures without hijab, then it must mean that hijab is more mandatory for people who read [print] newspapers!

The death of Mirzakhani has ignited a new round of attacks against compulsory hijab, though its true the debate is never long out of discussions on social media. Forced hijab haunts Iranian women even after death, wrote Melina. Another person was much angrier, lashing out at the website Khabar Onlines PhotoShop job and questioning how the editors could not die of shame. The agency had decided to cover her head even as it announced her death. I spit on you, the comment read.

Writer and sociologist Mohsen Hessam Mazaheri wrote that Irans official media had been presented with a serious challengeto show a popular and respectable woman without hijab. Unfortunately, he wrote, Irans official diction doesnt really allow for this: There is no such concept in the official-speak. He added that the challenge of publishing a photograph of Mirzakhani provided an unexpected opportunity to challenge the official lineand in this challenge, the loser was the official discourse on hijab. The winner, he said, was Mirzakhani, the Iranian genius who, with her undeniable standing, forced at least some of the official media to accept that she had made a choice. For the first time in almost 40 years after hijab was made compulsory, wrote Mazaheri, the picture of a respected Iranian woman has appeared on the front pages of the countrys newspapers.

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Of course, not everyone was willing to accept this. People like the conservative Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a former speaker of the parliament and the current President of the Persian Literature and Language Academy, saw no reason to change or question their position or discourse on hijab. Moreover, Haddad-Adel used the opportunity of how her death was being handled in the media to promote himself. The photo he shared online was taken when Mirzakhani lived in Iran in the mid-1990s and had been awarded a gold medal by Irans Mathematical Olympiad. It showed Mirzakhani in the third row with then President Hashemi Rafsanjani appearing in the front. Haddad-Adel is there, in the second row. But he decided to do his own PhotoShop job, cleanly cropping out Rafsanjani. The responses that he got, however, were far from laudatory. Those who commented talked about brain drain from Iran and asked: Why would a woman like Mirzakhani have to leave Iran to realize her potential?

The photographs of Mirzakhani across social networks were followed by another unexpected aftershock. One of the photographs posted online showed Mirzakhani holding her young daughter. According to the laws of the Islamic Republic, this little girl is not an Iranian national because her mother was married to Jan Vondrk, a non-Iranian. A few members of parliament scrambled about, trying to fix the situation. Fars News Agency published a report, again with the same picture of Mirzakhani without hijab, about parliamentarians who were busy trying to gather signatures to change the law so that Mirzakhanis daughter may be granted Iranian nationality.

Womens rights activists have been trying for years to persuade authorities to change the existing law, to no avail. Cure after death, was how one person on Twitter responded to the news story by Fars.

This story written by Aida Ghajar originally appeared on IranWire.

Excerpt from:
Iran Photoshops a Veil on Its Deceased Math Genius Maryam Mirzakhani - Daily Beast

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with her daughter, Gabriella. Photograph: PA

An imprisoned British-Iranian mother would face separation from her three-year-old British daughter under a two-tier system which means the UK government denies help to people with dual nationality, an MP has said.

Tulip Siddiq, who is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffes local MP, said she had been shocked by a meeting with the Foreign Office in which she said a minister implied the government was willing to help the charity workers young daughter, Gabriella, who is solely a British citizen, more than her.

The UK government has raised Zaghari-Ratcliffes case with Iranian authorities since her arrest in Iran last year as she attempted to return to Britain with Gabriella after visiting family. Dual nationals, however, are not able to access the same levels of consular assistance.

Siddiq told the Guardian her meeting before the general election with Tobias Ellwood, who has since moved to the Ministry of Defence, had an ultra-defensive atmosphere and said she left feeling shocked at the response from the government.

I had the strong impression from the meeting that their priority was making sure they got Gabriella back to the UK, seeing as she is a full British citizen, rather than helping Nazanin. That would take the pressure off them, given Nazanin is a dual citizen, the Labour MP said.

Gabriella is being looked after by her Iranian grandparents while her mother is in prison. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who travelled to Iran on her Iranian passport, is allowed some irregular access to her daughter, which her family have said is a lifeline for her while she is imprisoned.

The Foreign Offices current guidance meant Britain effectively operates a two-tier system for citizenship when protecting British citizens abroad, Siddiq said.

The guidance states the UK would not normally offer support or get involved in dealings between you and the authorities of that state if a dual national is arrested in a country where they also hold citizenship.

A Foreign Office spokesman said the government may make an exception if it judged a person to be particularly vulnerable, for example, if the case involves murder, forced marriage or an offence which carries the death penalty.

However, the help we can provide will depend on the circumstances, and the country of the persons other nationality agreeing to it, he said. All UK passports contain a warning about dual nationality. In the notes section, it says that British nationals who are also nationals of another country cannot be protected by Her Majestys representatives against the authorities of that country.

Siddiq said the Foreign Office must take a more robust approach to defending the rights of dual nationals abroad, with more than 600,000 Britons who hold additional passports not automatically entitled to consular protection.

Our law must change to ensure greater protection when dual nationals are detained, she said. FCO staff care about Nazanins plight, but they are hamstrung by an approach that isnt strong enough. The government must state that there should be no exception to taking clearly documented action on behalf of all UK nationals facing breaches of their human rights.

The MP for Hampstead and Kilburn will lead a debate in Westminster Hall on the topic on Tuesday, and has also drafted a 10-minute rule bill which would give Foreign Office officials the power to take a more robust and transparent approach. If selected, the bill would see a policy of escalation formalised and families and legal representation of the detained made aware of the process.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 38, was arrested at Tehran airport in April 2016, accused of attempting to orchestrate a soft overthrow of the Islamic republic, charges her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said were complete fabrication and linked to her work as a project manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Her conviction was upheld by Irans supreme court in April this year. Ratcliffe, has said he was deeply concerned for his wifes physical and mental health while she was being held in Tehrans Evin prison.

In June, the foreign minister Alistair Burt acknowledged that dual citizenship made it far tougher for the UK to act. The Iranian position on dual nationality makes progress difficult and we do not interfere with the legal systems of other countries, he said.

His predecessor said there were similar difficulties. The Iranian government does not recognise dual nationality and does not permit our consular staff to visit British-Iranian dual nationals detained there, Ellwood told MPs in September last year.

Siddiq said she was frustrated the government had never openly called for Zaghari-Ratcliffes release or publicly declared her innocence.

She is held on ridiculous charges of espionage that the government has not refuted despite numerous requests, the MP said. I do think there is more than meets the eye behind the lack of action.

Dozens of dual nationals are believed to be imprisoned in Iran with little recourse to consular support. One lawyer told the Guardian in April as many as 40 could be imprisoned in the country, among them Kamal Foroughi, a British-Iranian businessman, has been in jail since 2011.

His MP, the Conservative Oliver Dowden, has written a previous joint letter with Siddiq to the Foreign Office, signed by 216 fellow MPs.

Siddiq said she was hopeful that she would get the backing from a number of Conservative MPs who had supported the letter for a change in the law. This isnt about me opposing the Conservative government, this is about taking constructive action to protect the rights of vulnerable people, she said.

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MP says UK denying help to British-Iranian mother in Tehran jail - The Guardian

This 2009 photo released by a friend of Xiyue Wang shows Wang at his apartment in Hong Kong. Princeton University professor Stephen Kotkin, who advised Wang, defended his former student as innocent of all charges against him. Friend of Xiyue Wang/AP hide caption

Iran says it has sentenced an American graduate student to 10 years in prison for spying for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The Princeton University student was in Iran doing research when he was arrested.

Xiyue Wang, 37, is pursuing a Ph.D. in Eurasian history, studying local government in predominantly Muslim regions during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Stephen Kotkin, Wang's advisor at Princeton, says Wang came well-prepared for an extremely ambitious thesis topic.

"He had tremendous background, life experiences, linguistic capabilities, and so he entered the program and hit the ground running and developed his interests even more," Kotkin says.

The fieldwork stage of Wang's scholarly research took him to Iran about a year ago, Kotkin says. Before he left, Wang called upon established scholars for information.

"Everything he did is normal absolutely everything he did is normal, standard practice for scholars in this region and elsewhere," Kotkin says.

When doing academic fieldwork, he says, a researcher's time is limited but the need for documentation is infinite.

"So you're hurrying, hurrying, hurrying to encompass all the documents that you can, sometimes photocopying and scanning, and then trying to bring those out for further study," he explains.

But Wang never got that opportunity. He was arrested 10 months ago. Princeton says it has been working quietly to win his release.

"He was arrested in Iran last summer, while there doing scholarly research on the administrative and cultural history of the late Qajar dynasty in connection with his Ph.D. dissertation," Princeton spokesman Daniel Day said in a statement. "Since his arrest, the university has worked with Mr. Wang's family, the U.S. government, private counsel and others to facilitate his release."

This weekend, the Mizan news agency, a mouthpiece for Iran's judiciary, broke the news of Wong's 10-year sentence.

It said Wang was accused of gathering confidential articles with the intention of delivering them to the State Department and Western academic institutions.

Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, says materials "dealing with matters going back to the 19th century would be a very different matter than, say, Iran's ongoing nuclear program."

Wong is a U.S. citizen, born in China. His arrest comes as several Iranian-Americans are already being held in jails in Iran.

Vatanka says Wang may have been caught up in a power struggle in Iran between hardliners and more the moderate government of President Hassan Rouhani. Two years ago, Rouhani signed a nuclear agreement with the U.S. and other world powers to curb Iran's nuclear capability in exchange for easing economic sanctions. Since then, Rouhani has been trying to bring in foreign investment and burnish Iran's image, Vatanka says.

"When something like this happens, it takes them back 10 steps to images of Iran that they certainly don't think are helpful for the kind of future of the country that they'd like to build," he says.

Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution says these sorts of arrests and prison sentences are a persistent risk in Iran, especially for individuals traveling on their own, students and dual nationals.

"There's often a temptation to look for some kind of logic here," she says. "I think that this particular case highlights the fact that the logic is simply the paranoia of the Islamic Republic its judiciary and its security services in particular."

The State Department issued a statement saying it's aware of the reports of Wang's incarceration and is calling for the "immediate release of all U.S. citizens unjustly detained in Iran so they can return to their families."

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Academic Adviser Of US Student Jailed In Iran: 'Everything He Did Was Normal' - NPR