Arya News - Iran is “seriously talking” to the United States as Washington is looking to strike a deal on Tehran’s nuclear programme, Donald Trump has said.
Iran is “seriously talking” to the United States as Washington is looking to strike a deal on Tehran’s nuclear programme , Donald Trump has said.
On Saturday, the US president said that Tehran was in talks with Washington and could reach a deal by stopping its nuclear programme.
He also suggested that a deal between the US and Iran could prevent the US carrying out military attacks.
Speaking to reporters on his way to Florida, he said: “You could make a negotiated deal that would be satisfactory with no nuclear weapons … They should do that, but I don’t know that they will. They are talking to us – seriously talking.”
The president also told Fox News that the US would not share information with regional allies about its plans to potentially launch a military attack on Iran.
‘‘Well, we can’t tell them the plan. If I told them the plan, it would be almost as bad as telling you the plan – it could be worse, actually,” he said.
Mr Trump added that Washington was looking to see if a deal could be made with Iran, saying: “Otherwise, we’ll see what happens … We have a big fleet heading out there , bigger than we had – and still have, actually – in Venezuela.”
Threats of ‘regional war’
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, warned the US on Sunday that any attack on the country would ignite a regional war .
The semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted Khamenei as saying: “The Americans should know that if they start a war, this time it will be a regional war.”
Ali Larijani, head of Iran’s supreme national security council, also confirmed that Tehran was in talks with the US on Saturday.
“Contrary to the hype of the contrived media war, structural arrangements for negotiations are progressing,” he said.
Iran has held marathon talks with regional leaders in recent weeks in an attempt to prevent the US from launching an attack.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, met Mr Larijani in Tehran on Saturday to “de-escalate tensions in the region”.
Meanwhile, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, met with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, and Hakan Fidan, the country’s foreign minister, in Istanbul on Friday to discuss the situation with Washington.
On Sunday, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, said Tehran had decided to brand the armies of European countries as “terrorist groups”, which was met with chants of “death to America” by politicians.
The decision came in response to the EU designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the country’s parallel military body that protects the Islamic regime, as a terror group earlier this week.
“By trying to hit the revolutionary guards ... the Europeans actually shot themselves in the foot and once again made a decision against the interests of their people by blindly obeying the Americans,” Mr Ghalibaf said.
He cited law from 2019 in which Iran can reciprocally declare the militaries of other nations to be terrorist groups if they designated the IRGC as a terror organisation first.
“According to Article 7 of the Law on Countermeasures Against the Declaration of the Revolutionary Guards as a Terrorist Organisation, the armies of European countries are considered terrorist groups,” he added.
Members of Iran’s parliament chant ‘death to America’ after its speaker labelled European armies as terrorist groups - Icana News Agency/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said that Mr Trump was a president “who has made many promises. You’ll be hard-pressed to find one that he hasn’t kept. He doesn’t make empty threats”.
“What I would say to [the people of Iran] is, note carefully what the president says, take him at his word. He will keep his promise,” he told Israel’s Channel 12.
Mr Huckabee also noted that a “decision still needs to be made,” regarding a possible American strike on Iran .
“President Trump is always hopeful for the best outcome. He is, in fact, let’s never forget, ‘the art of the deal’. And if he can get that, then that’s ideal,” he said.
Masoud Pezeshkian, the president of Iran, said on Saturday that Tehran “has never sought, and in no way seeks, war and it is firmly convinced that a war would be in the interest of neither Iran, nor the United States, nor the region.”
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