Iranians recall the 444-day American embassy hostage crisis of 1979
TEHRAN: For those who were there, the memories are still fresh, 40 years after one of the defining events of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, when protesters seized the US embassy in Tehran and set off a 444-day hostage crisis.
The consequences of that crisis reverberate to this day.
Veteran Iranian photographer Kaveh Kazemi recalled snapping away with his camera as he stood behind the gate where the Iranian militant students would usher blindfolded American hostages to those gathered outside waving antiamerican banners and calling for the extradition of the deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. “Sometimes they would bring a US flag and burn it, put it in flames and then throw it among the crowd,” said Kazemi, now 67, pointing to the spot. “They would come and chant ‘death to America,’ ‘death to the shah’ ... it changed the world as I knew it.”
Anger toward America had already been growing throughout 1979 as Iran’s revolutionary government took hold, but it boiled over in October
when the US took in the ailing shah for medical treatment. After several protests, the Islamist students raided the embassy on November 4 and took 98 hostages. It prompted President Jimmy Carter to expel Iranian diplomats and launch a failed rescue mission before the Americans were eventually released on the last day of his presidency, setting off decades of hostility amid an Islamic takeover that turned the country from a former U.S. ally into perhaps its greatest adversary.
Many of those sentiments remain today amid the escalating tensions between Tehran and Washington, following the disintegration of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal and the subsequent U.S. sanctions that have sent the Iranian economy into free fall.
Outside the former embassy’s shaded red brick walls, which were in the process of being painted with anti-us murals for the upcoming anniversary, former protester Hossein Kouhi said he turned out in 1979 to denounce what he called US intervention in Iran’s internal affairs.