(May 23): Several Arab nations joined Pakistan in trying to push for a resolution to the Iran war as they urged US President Donald Trump to allow more time for negotiations.
While there were indications of progress in talks to end the conflict, Axios and CBS News reported that Trump was preparing for a possible fresh round of strikes, although he hadn’t made a final decision.
Iran warned that any new attacks by the US or Israel would extend the war to “new regional fronts”, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported, citing a military source.
One of the countries in the region, the United Arab Emirates, joined Qatar and Saudi Arabia in appeals to Trump, according to several people familiar with the matter.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi held separate calls with his Turkish, Qatari and Iraqi counterparts, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Telegram early on Saturday.
Araghchi also spoke with United Nations Secretary General António Guterres regarding “the latest state of the ongoing diplomatic process aimed at ending the war”.
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Earlier on Friday, the favoured interlocutor between the US and Iran, Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, arrived in Tehran.
Munir was welcomed by Iranian Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni, according to the military’s press wing. He is expected to take part in discussions that will cover US-Iran negotiations, said a Pakistani security official familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there had been “slight progress” in negotiations. “I don’t want to exaggerate it, but there’s been a little bit of movement, and that’s good,” he told the media at a meeting of Nato foreign ministers in Sweden on Friday.
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Trump told reporters at the White House that Iran was “dying to make a deal”. The president has threatened further attacks on the Islamic Republic if it doesn’t agree to terms acceptable to the US.
Since the ceasefire went into effect six weeks ago, Trump has veered between assurances that a peace accord was almost at hand and threats of new aerial assaults.
At the same time, opposition to the war has heightened among Americans upset about the sharp rise in gasoline prices as the conflict disrupts global energy markets. Those anxieties, reflected in several polls, have resonated on Capitol Hill, months before midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.
Earlier this week, the Republican-led Senate signaled mounting opposition to continuing the war with a procedural vote. On Thursday, the party’s leaders abruptly canceled a vote on the conflict as GOP absences threatened an embarrassing defeat for the president.
Yet Senator Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, cautioned that Trump was being “ill-advised to pursue a deal that would not be worth the paper it is written on”.
“Our commander-in-chief needs to allow America’s skilled armed forces to finish the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities and reopen the strait,” Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, said in a statement on Friday.
He was referring to the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial passageway for global energy supplies that, along with Iran’s nuclear programme, have been major obstacles in the diplomacy.
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Iran’s ambassador to France, Mohammad Amin-Nejad, told Bloomberg on Wednesday that his country was discussing with Oman some form of permanent toll system in the strait, which the US calls unacceptable.
Rubio said that would set a precedent for other areas of the world and that no country should accept the imposition of tolls in Hormuz.
Aside from Hormuz, the US has repeatedly demanded Tehran hand over its enriched uranium and commit to ending enrichment for at least a decade. Iranian leaders have publicly rejected that, citing a right to the process under international agreements.
More related to the Iran war:
- Japan, one of Asia’s largest importers of energy from the Middle East, flagged the impending arrival of its first oil shipment from the Persian Gulf since the war began.
- Iran claimed 35 ships crossed Hormuz in the past day after obtaining permission, ISNA reports citing an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps statement.
- Iran has destroyed more than two dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones operated by US forces since the war began, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. That represents 20% of the Pentagon’s pre-war inventory for the hard-to-replace unmanned system.
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