DUBAI: Iran’s foreign ministry said indirect, EU-mediated talks between Tehran and Washington in the Qatari capital were proceeding in a “serious” atmosphere, denying an earlier report that they had ended.
The talks are aimed at overcoming differences over how to salvage a 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and world powers.
Earlier, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency had reported that the negotiations in Doha had ended without result.
“The two-day talks are not over yet and later today Iran’s top nuclear negotiator and the EU’s envoy Enrique Mora will meet again,” ministry spokesman Naser Kanani said, according to Iranian state media.
“Talks continue in a serious and business-like atmosphere.”
The talks started on Tuesday with Mora as the coordinator, shuttling between Iran’s Ali Bagheri Kani and Washington’s special Iran envoy Rob Malley. They are trying to break a months-long impasse that has stalled negotiations in Vienna to reinstate the 2015 pact.
“What prevented these negotiations from coming to fruition is the US insistence on its proposed draft text in Vienna that excludes any guarantee for Iran’s economic benefits,” Tasnim said, citing informed sources at the talks.
Then-US president Donald Trump ditched the pact in 2018 and reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran’s economy. A year later, Tehran reacted by gradually breaching nuclear limits of the deal.
Over 11 months of talks between Tehran and major powers to revive their nuclear deal stalled in March, chiefly over Tehran’s insistence that Washington remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), its elite security force, from the US Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list.
Earlier, it was reported that indirect talks between Iran and the US in Doha to narrow remaining gaps for revival of a 2015 nuclear agreement have ended without result, Iran’s Tasnim news agency said on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Iran warned the US to abandon the “Trump method” on Wednesday after the two sides opened indirect talks to revive a nuclear deal that was torpedoed by the former American president. But Iranian officials said they were hoping for progress in the talks in Qatar, which come after international meetings to return to the deal hit a roadblock.
Iran agreed to curb its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief in 2015, before then US president Donald Trump pulled out of the deal three years later. “We hope that, God willing, we can reach a positive and acceptable agreement if the United States abandons the Trump method,” Iranian government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi said.
He described the “Trump method” as “non-compliance with international law and past agreements and disregard for the legal rights of the Iranian people”. The indirect talks — with the rival delegations sending each other messages from different parts of the same hotel — come just two weeks before US President Joe Biden makes his first official visit to the region, with Iran high on his agenda. — Reuters
