Key points
- Top negotiators’ talks to follow expert-level meetings
- Iran’s red line includes maintaining uranium enrichment
- Tehran insists defence power like missile programme non-negotiable
ISLAMABAD: The third round of high-level nuclear talks between Iran and the United States, held in Oman’s capital Muscat, began Saturday, Iranian state television reported.
“These talks will begin around noon Tehran time (0830 GMT),” an Iranian state television journalist reported from Muscat, adding that the exact timing will be “officially announced” later.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi will negotiate indirectly with Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff in Muscat through Omani mediators, a week after a second round in Rome that both sides described as constructive.
Talks are set to start at the expert level, which will begin drawing up a framework for a potential nuclear deal, ahead of an indirect meeting between the lead negotiators, according to Reuters.
“Maximum pressure”
Trump, in an interview with Time magazine published on Friday, said, “I think we’re going to make a deal with Iran”, but he repeated a threat of military action against Iran if diplomacy fails.
While both Tehran and Washington have said they are set on pursuing diplomacy, they remain far apart on a dispute that has rumbled on for more than two decades.
Trump, who has restored a “maximum pressure” campaign on Tehran since February, ditched a 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and six world powers in 2018 during his first term and reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran.
The sanctions regimes imposed on Iran are complex and multilayered, and each layer has to be linked to a specific action or guarantee Iran is being asked to undertake with regard to its nuclear programme.
