VIENNA, TEHRAN: Iran has just days left to accept a deal on its nuclear program at talks in Vienna, France has warned. “It is not a question of weeks, it is a question of days,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told the Senate, adding that a major crisis would be unleashed if there is no agreement.
Iran’s supreme leader said on Thursday that it will further develop peaceful nuclear capacity to preserve independence.
“We will sooner or later need peaceful nuclear energy. If we do not pursue it ... our independence will be harmed,” Iran’s highest authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a televised speech, supporting Tehran’s hard-line negotiating team in Vienna.
Ned Price, US State Department spokesperson, said the US is in “the midst of the very final stages” of indirect talks with Iran.
“This is really the decisive period during which we’ll be able to determine whether a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA is in the offing, or if it’s not,” Price — using an abbreviation for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 deal with world powers — told reporters.
The deal lays out phases of mutual steps to bring both sides back into full compliance, and the first does not include waivers on oil sanctions, diplomats say.
Delegates say much of the text is settled but some thorny issues remain.
The broad objective is to return to the original bargain of lifting sanctions against Iran, including ones that have slashed its crucial oil sales, in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear activities that extend the time it would need to produce enough enriched uranium for an atomic bomb if it chose to.
While the 2015 deal capped uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent fissile purity, Iran is now enriching to up to 60 percent, close to weapons grade.
The draft text of the agreement, which is more than 20 pages long, stipulates a sequence of steps to be implemented once it has been approved by the remaining parties to the deal, starting with a phase including Iran suspending enrichment above 5 percent purity, three diplomats familiar with negotiations said.
The text also alludes to other measures that diplomats say include unfreezing about $7 billion in Iranian funds stuck in South Korean banks under US sanctions, as well as the release of Western prisoners held in Iran, which US lead negotiator Robert Malley has suggested is a requirement for a deal.
Only once that initial wave of measures has been taken and confirmed would the main phase of sanctions-lifting begin, culminating in what many diplomats call Re-Implementation Day — a nod to the original deal’s Implementation Day, when the last nuclear and sanctions-related measures fell into place.
Iran will return to core nuclear limits like the 3.67 percent cap on enrichment purity, diplomats said.
Expedite deal, France warns Iran as Khamenei orders nuclear progress
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Expedite deal, France warns Iran as Khamenei orders nuclear progress
- Vienna agreement draft puts prisoners, enrichment, cash first, oil comes later, say diplomats
Kurdish official says Kurds committed to deals with Damascus despite Aleppo violence
- Ahmad said that “we are committed to peace and to resolving problems through dialogue”
- She accused Syria’s authorities of “choosing the path of war” by attacking Kurdish districts in Aleppo
BEIRUT: Syria’s Kurds are committed to agreements reached with the government, a senior official from their administration told AFP on Friday, despite days of violence in the northern city of Aleppo.
The government and Kurdish forces have traded blame over who started the fighting on Tuesday, which came as they have struggled to implement a deal reached last March to merge the Kurds’ administration and military into the country’s new government.
Elham Ahmad, a senior official in the Kurdish administration in Syria’s northeast, said that “we are committed to peace and to resolving problems through dialogue. But until now, the government... does not want a solution.”
She accused Syria’s authorities of “choosing the path of war” by attacking Kurdish districts in Aleppo.
“With these attacks, the government side is seeking to put an end to the agreements that have been reached. We are committed to them and we are seeking to implement them,” she said.
The government announced a truce early Friday after days of deadly violence that has forced thousands to flee, and granted Kurdish fighters a deadline to leave two districts they control.
But the fighters were refusing to leave the Ashrafiyeh and Sheikh Maqsud areas and intended to “resist” the Syrian army encircling them, a statement by the local councils of the two neighborhoods said.
Ahmad said that “the United States is playing a mediating role... we hope they will apply pressure to reach an agreement.”
A diplomatic source told AFP on Friday that US envoy Tom Barrack was headed to Damascus.
