(Bloomberg) — The US and Iran held direct three-way talks with Pakistan on Saturday to end the six-week-old war in the Middle East, according to a US and an Iranian official familiar with the situation.
US Vice President JD Vance and negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have been meeting since about 5:30 pm local time with an Iranian team that includes Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, a veteran of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the officials said.
Teams of experts joined the main negotiators after about an hour, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported. Those technical discussions in Islamabad focused on the Strait of Hormuz, a potential ceasefire extension and phased sanctions relief, mostly avoided the core issues that the Trump administration said drove it to war, according to a US official and a Pakistani official familiar with the matter.
Those issues include Iran’s support for armed proxies, and the nuclear and missile programs that were at the heart of Trump’s stated reasons for attacking Iran beginning Feb. 28.
“We have goodwill, but we do not have trust,” Ghalibaf told reporters after arriving in Islamabad, according to Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency. “In the upcoming negotiations, if the American side is prepared for a genuine agreement and to grant the rights of the Iranian nation, they will see readiness for an agreement from us as well.”
Tasnim said that Tehran’s 71-member delegation also included the Islamic Republic’s central bank governor Abdolnaser Hemmati.
US President Donald Trump sought to ramp up pressure on Iran ahead of the talks, posting on social media Saturday morning “everyone knows that they are LOSING, and LOSING BIG!” The American leader told reporters late Friday that he expected the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway that has become Iran’s main point of leverage, would be opened “pretty quickly” and warned that he could resume military action if the strait doesn’t reopen.
Although the ceasefire has broadly held across the Middle East, the inability of oil tankers and other vessels to easily transit the strait — along with continued fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon — has threatened to complicate the talks in Islamabad.
Israel, which is not party to Saturday’s negotiations, has continued to strike towns in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said it launched more than 200 strikes against Hezbollah in the past 24 hours.
While talks got off to a fitful start, two US Navy ships — the USS Frank E. Peterson and the USS Michael Murphy — transited the strait and operated in the Arabian Gulf, according to the US military, as the first steps toward clearing the mines that the US says Iran planted in the waterway.
“Today, we began the process of establishing a new passage and we will share this safe pathway with the maritime industry soon to encourage the free flow of commerce,” according to a statement from Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander in the war theater.
A regional intelligence official told Axios that the warships were forced to turn back after encountering threats from the IRGC. Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency said the nation’s armed forces monitored a US destroyer seen moving from Fujairah toward the Strait of Hormuz and conveyed this to the US via Pakistani mediators. The US vessel returned from the strait after Tehran warned that it would be targeted, according to Fars.
The US statement made no mention of such incidents.
Before arriving in Pakistan, Ghalibaf stressed on social media that a ceasefire in Lebanon is one measure that “must be fulfilled before negotiations begin.” The other is the “release of Iran’s blocked assets,” he added, without being more specific.
Vance told reporters ahead of his trip that Trump had provided “clear guidelines” for the talks. Both sides spoke of distrust in the other in the runup to the meeting.
Also on the agenda will be the fate of Iran’s uranium stockpile and missile production, as well as US sanctions against the Islamic Republic and broader military presence in the Middle East. Many of those issues were the same ones the two sides failed to resolve in February negotiations before the war began.
Trump has alternated between threatening to wipe out “a whole civilization” and saying a US-Iran deal “could be the Golden Age of the Middle East.” Iran, which has said more than 3,000 people have been killed in US-Israeli airstrikes, has been defiant, confident that its control of the strait — and with it about a fifth of global oil flows — will force the White House to accede to its demands.
Pakistan has played a key role in helping strike the two-week ceasefire earlier this week, which came hours before a deadline set by Trump to dramatically escalate attacks on Iran, including power plants and other civilian infrastructure — which could have constituted potential war crimes if acted upon. That could have risked retaliatory strikes against Gulf states, which could have led to a humanitarian crisis and inflict lasting damage to global energy production.
Pakistan has leveraged its close ties with multiple key players in the conflict, forging close links with the Trump administration while also sharing close historical ties with Iran, with which it shares a border. Pakistan also has warm ties with Saudi Arabia, reaching a defense agreement last year, and other Gulf nations that have borne the brunt of Iran’s regional attacks.
Islamabad has gone under effective lockdown in the lead-up to the talks. The capital’s luxury hotels have been booked out, police checkpoints and road blockades have sprung up and army patrols were in evidence across the city.
–With assistance from Courtney Subramanian, Josh Wingrove, Golnar Motevalli, Faseeh Mangi, Dan Strumpf, Tooba Khan and Bilal Hussain.
(Updates with details on technical discussions in third paragraph.)
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