Negotiators for Iran and the United States have concluded a fifth round of talks, as mediator Oman said there was some limited progress in negotiations aimed at resolving a decades-long dispute over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
“The fifth round of Iran-US talks have concluded today in Rome with some, but not conclusive, progress,” said Omani mediator Badr al-Busaidi after Friday’s meeting at the Omani embassy in Rome’s Camilluccia neighbourhood.
“We hope to clarify the remaining issues in the coming days,” he said after the high-level talks, which were led by Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
Araghchi told Iranian state television that the talks had been “one of the most professional rounds of negotiations” so far, noting that, while an agreement had not been reached, the Iranian side was “not discouraged”.
“We firmly stated Iran’s position … The fact that we are now on a reasonable path, in my view, is itself a sign of progress,” Araghchi told Press TV.
“The proposals and solutions will be reviewed in respective capitals … and the next round of talks will be scheduled accordingly.”
Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said earlier that chief US negotiator Steve Witkoff had left the negotiations early “due to his flight schedule”, but that they had continued in a “sane and calm atmosphere”.
The ongoing talks seek a new deal in which Iran would be prevented from producing nuclear weapons while having international sanctions eased.
However, little progress has been made so far, and both Washington and Tehran have taken a tough stance in public in recent days, particularly regarding Iran’s enrichment of uranium.
Witkoff has said Iran cannot be allowed to carry out any enrichment.
Tehran, which has raised its enrichment to about 60 percent, well above civilian needs but below the 90 percent needed for weaponisation, has rejected that “red line”.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the demand “excessive and outrageous“, warning that the ongoing talks are unlikely to yield results.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that Washington is working to reach an agreement that would allow Iran to have a civil nuclear energy programme, but not enrich uranium, while admitting that achieving such a deal “will not be easy”.
On Thursday, the Department of State announced new sanctions on Iran’s construction sector.
“Figuring out the path to a deal is not rocket science,” Araghchi said on social media on Friday morning. “Zero nuclear weapons = we DO have a deal. Zero enrichment = we do NOT have a deal. Time to decide.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran took aim at the new sanctions, calling the move “vicious, illegal, and inhumane”.
Reporting from Rome, Al Jazeera’s Milena Veselinovic said uranium enrichment was not the only “stumbling block” in the talks. The US delegation had also wanted to broach the subject of Iran’s ballistic missile programme, which the Iranian side has insisted was a “completely separate issue to the nuclear programme”, she said.
High stakes
The stakes are high for both sides. Trump wants to curtail Tehran’s potential to produce a nuclear weapon that could trigger a regional nuclear arms race.
Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are strictly civilian, but seeks to ease international sanctions that hamper its economy.
During his first term, in 2018, Trump nixed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a 2015 agreement that saw Iran scale back its nuclear programme in exchange for eased sanctions.
After his return to the White House for a second term in January, Trump renewed his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, piling further economic pressure, for example, by choking the country’s oil exports, particularly to China.
Iran responded defiantly, promising to defend itself against any attack and escalating enrichment far beyond the 2015 pact’s limits.
Tensions began to ease in April as the two countries entered into the indirect talks, but Tehran’s enrichment programme has become a key point of contention.
Trump has raised the threat of US military action if no agreement is reached. Israel, which opposes the US talks with its regional foe, has warned that it would never allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. Following reports that Israel may be planning to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, Araghchi said that the United States would bear legal responsibility if Iran is attacked.
Hamid Reza Gholamzade, director of think tank The House of Diplomacy, told Al Jazeera that threats of military action were just a “stick” to “bully” Iran into negotiations.
“Iran knows that the threat is not real, and if there is any attack, Iran would respond strongly to that. The reality is that if they could have damaged the Iranian facilities, they [would] have done it long ago,“ he said, speaking from Tehran.
The US, he said, did not want a “fully fledged war in the region”. “They know that if there is a war, if there is an attack, it would be necessarily dragging Americans into [a] long war here”.
