Indirect negotiations began between the US and Iranian delegations in Doha on Tuesday evening, to resolve the outstanding issues, through the mediation of the European Union’s Foreign Policy Commission. Negotiations lasted for two days, but soon ended without any progress.
The United States expressed its “disappointment” at the lack of “any progress” in the negotiations. “The indirect talks in Doha have ended,” a US State Department spokesman said, and “we are disappointed that Iran has, once once more, refused to respond positively to the EU initiative, and therefore no progress has been made.”
The US spokesman’s statement came shortly following the European Union’s coordinator in negotiations with Iran, Enrique Mora, announced that the Doha talks did not result in the “progress” that the union hopes.
Iranian serious
For its part, the Iranian news agency quoted Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Majid Takht Ravanchi, as saying that Tehran acted seriously in the Doha talks, at a time when the European Union called for the need to conclude an agreement as soon as possible.
Rawangi described the Doha talks as positive, and confirmed that his country will be in contact with the European Union coordinator for the next round of talks.
The ambassador stated that Tehran had asked the United States for “objective and verifiable guarantees,” and said that once the other parties fulfilled all their commitments in a full and effective manner, his country would immediately reverse all steps it took following Washington withdrew from the 2015 agreement.
In the same context, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, Mohammad Eslami, said that the opposing party in the recent nuclear negotiations reopened the file of the military dimensions of the Iranian nuclear program once more, despite the file’s previous closure.
An agreement appeared imminent in March, when the European Union, which is coordinating the negotiations, invited the foreign ministers of the signatories to Vienna to complete the agreement following 11 months of indirect negotiations between Tehran and the administration of the US president. But talks have since been suspended, mainly due to Tehran’s insistence that Washington remove the Revolutionary Guards from its list of terrorist organizations.
Eslami affirmed that the Iranian nuclear program has been proven to be peaceful to the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite what he called “the allegations of the Zionist entity.”
As for the United States, during a Security Council session on the nuclear deal, it expressed its concern regarding recent steps taken by Iran, which it said undermine the monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Tehran recently commissioned new centrifuges at the Fordo facility, located more than 100 kilometers south of the capital, Tehran. Earlier, the Iranian authorities stopped the work of surveillance cameras belonging to the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor its nuclear activities.
