Just hours before the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, Oman’s foreign minister said a breakthrough in US-Iran talks had brought a peace deal “within our reach.”
“A peace deal is within our reach if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there,” Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi told CBS’ Face the Nation on Friday in a rare interview, adding that the main obstacles to a deal had been overcome.
“If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing a very important breakthrough that has not been achieved any time before,” he said. “The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never ever have the nuclear material that will create a bomb.”
Albusaidi said Iran had agreed not to stockpile excess nuclear material that could be used to build a bomb, a concession he suggested went beyond the limits imposed under the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration.
“This is something that has really been missed a lot by the media, and I want to clarify that from the standpoint of a mediator,” he said. “There would be zero accumulation, zero stockpiling and full verification… by the (UN nuclear watchdog), the IAEA.”
His comments came hours after President Donald Trump told reporters he was “not happy” with the talks, saying Iran was “not willing to give us what we have to have.”
Oman’s role: The country has served as a diplomatic backchannel between Washington and Tehran for years. It had mediated three rounds of talks between the two sides, with Albusaidi expressing optimism following the latest round on Thursday.-CNN