Pakistan’s interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, flew to Tehran on Wednesday for the second time in a single week. Iranian state media said the trip came while Iran and the United States remained stuck over a proposal to end the war.
The official IRNA news agency, citing diplomatic sources in Islamabad, reported that Naqvi was there to meet Iranian officials. Iranian media said he had also been in the Iranian capital on Saturday to “facilitate” the process between Tehran and Washington.
Islamabad has been the go-between since the US and Israeli war on Iran began on February 28. A temporary ceasefire came on April 8 through Pakistani mediation, but later negotiations stalled over how to implement it and over regional developments that followed.
Positions on both sides
Reuters reported on Monday, citing a Pakistani source, that Islamabad had passed a revised Iranian proposal to the US. The same source was frank about the pace. “We don’t have much time,” the source said, adding that both sides “keep changing their goalposts.”
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said at his weekly press conference that Tehran would not negotiate through the media. He confirmed that contacts with the US were continuing. “Talks are continuing under Pakistani mediation,” he said.
The exchange, as he described it, has gone both ways. “The Americans presented proposals, and we also presented our views,” Baghaei said. He waved away reports that the talks had touched on uranium enrichment and nuclear material. “They raised speculation about enrichment and uranium materials, and we announced that it has no basis,” he said.
He also had a word for Iran’s neighbors. Iran, he said, has “no hostility with any country in the region”, but states there, the United Arab Emirates in particular, needed to “draw lessons from recent developments.”
Sources
- TRT World – Pakistani minister arrives in Tehran amid mediation efforts between Iran, US
- Pakistan minister visits Tehran amid US-Iran impasse: Iranian media – Türkiye Today
