TEHRAN —
Iran and the US plan to resume
indirect talks this week in Qatar, in a fresh bid to revive the landmark 2015
nuclear deal, both sides said Monday.
اضافة اعلان
The talks will be separate from broader EU-mediated
negotiations in Vienna between Iran and major powers, the bloc’s top diplomat
Josep Borrell said Saturday in Tehran.
The nuclear deal has been hanging by a thread since
2018, when then US president
Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from it and
began re-imposing harsh economic sanctions on America’s arch enemy.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has sought
to return to the agreement, saying it would be the best path ahead with the
Islamic republic, although it has voiced growing pessimism in recent weeks.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh
said Monday the talks would focus on the lifting of US sanctions and be held
“in a Persian Gulf country in the coming days, later this week”.
The US State Department said the talks would take
place in Qatar’s capital Doha.
Iran’s Tasnim news agency, quoting an unnamed
foreign ministry source, reported that Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator
Ali Bagheri would visit Qatar on Tuesday for “negotiations on lifting sanctions”
and that the US-Iranian indirect talks would be held there.
A State Department spokesperson said the US was also
“grateful to our EU partners, who continue to convey messages and are working
to advance these negotiations”.
“We are prepared to immediately conclude and
implement the deal we negotiated in Vienna for mutual return to full
implementation of the JCPOA,” he said, referring to the deal’s formal name, the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“But for that, Iran needs to decide to drop their
additional demands that go beyond the JCPOA.”
Key role for Qatar
Qatar, which has better
relations with Tehran than most
Gulf Arab monarchies, has sought a role as a
diplomatic hub, earlier helping arrange talks between Washington and the
Taliban before the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Khatibzadeh voiced hope for “positive results” from
the talks.
“What we will do in the coming days does not concern
the nuclear dimension but existing differences (and) the lifting of sanctions,”
Khatibzadeh said.
“If Washington comes with answers, then we can do
the work quickly. ... The ball is in Washington’s court.”
Talks to revive the nuclear deal began in Vienna in
April last year but hit a snag in March this year amid differences between
Tehran and Washington, notably over a demand by Iran that its Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps be removed from a US terror list.
During the
Vienna talks, Iran also repeatedly called
for US guarantees that there will be no repeat of Trump’s pullout.
The Biden administration says that ending Trump’s
blacklisting of the Revolutionary Guards — a step sure to outrage much of
Congress — falls out of the purview of talks to restore the nuclear accord.
In a step to address concerns raised when Trump made the
move in 2019, the Biden administration said last week that Iranians who were
previously forced to serve in the
Revolutionary Guards would not be denied
entry into the US.
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