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(Bloomberg) — The US and Iran began 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.
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US Vice President JD Vance arrived in Islamabad early Saturday, joining special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to firm up a fragile ceasefire that took hold several days ago. Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said Tehran’s 71-member delegation was led by Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, a veteran of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and also included Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and central bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati.
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Vance, Kushner and Witkoff have been meeting with an Iranian team that includes Ghalibaf and Araghchi, the officials said.
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“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.”
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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 that the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway that has become Iran’s main point of leverage, would be opened “pretty quickly” and warned that if it didn’t he could resume military action.
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While 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. It’s unclear how long the discussions will go on, with neither side releasing a schedule.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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