Tehran/Washington; The Iranian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that the indirect talks with the United States ended in Oman with the parties agreeing to continue the talks next week.
The Iranian and US delegations are holding talks in Oman’s capital, Muscat, to discuss the Iranian nuclear programme.
Ahead of the talks, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran is seeking a “fair agreement” with Washington, Mehr News reported.
“Our intention is to reach a fair and honorable agreement on an equal footing,” Araghchi said on Iranian state television on Saturday, ahead of his high-level meeting with US President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff.
Araghchi said there was “a chance” of reaching a compromise “if the other side” adopts the same position.
On Saturday morning, Araghchi and his Omani counterpart, Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi, conferred on the arrangement for the indirect talks.
The indirect talks are being mediated by al-Busaidi.
Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi said that Saturday’s nuclear talks between Iran and the United States took place in a friendly atmosphere.
“I am proud to announce that today in Muscat we hosted Iranian Foreign Minister Dr. Seyed Abbas Araghchi and US Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff and mediated to begin a process of dialogue and negotiations with the shared aim of concluding a fair and binding agreement,” the top Omani diplomat said in a post on X after hosting the indirect talks.
“I would like to thank my two colleagues for this engagement which took place in a friendly atmosphere conducive to bridging viewpoints and ultimately achieving regional and global peace, security and stability.”
“We will continue to work together and put further efforts to assist in arriving at this goal,” al-Busaidi said.
On Friday, President Donald Trump told reporters, “I want Iran to be a wonderful, great, happy country. But they can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
The statement came days after Trump warned that the US would resort to military force if the talks fail, saying that Iran “would face great danger” in such a scenario.
Amid the Muscat talks, in a show of force, the Trump administration has stationed B-2 stealth bombers at Diego Garcia, a remote US base in the Indian Ocean far beyond the range of most Iranian missiles. The move underscores Washington’s readiness to strike if the talks collapse and signals to Tehran that military options remain firmly on the table.
Iran is currently enriching uranium to the 60 percent threshold, just short of weapons grade, including by using advanced centrifuge designs at the deeply-buried Fordow enrichment facility, a NIAC fact sheet showed.
The programme is not housed at a single facility but “dispersed across Iran, with the most sensitive operations taking place at deeply buried facilities that are difficult to destroy”.
UNI
