Roving Periscope: After talks collapsed, US-wary Iranians switched aircraft, travelled by bus, train!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Their mistrust of the US was so intense that the Iranian delegation to the Islamabad ‘ceasefire talks’ took care to switch aircraft and even travelled by bus and train to return home after the negotiations collapsed abruptly last weekend, according to media reports on Wednesday.
The Iranian delegation reportedly faced urgent security threats while returning to Tehran, Iranian political analyst Mohammad Marandi told the Lebanese news outlet Al-Mayadeen.
Amid heightened caution, the group, including Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, switched their flight midway and took an alternative route to reach Tehran by bus and train.
Marandi, a professor at Tehran University, who accompanied the Iranian delegation to Islamabad, said the Iranian delegation felt seriously threatened during their return from negotiations in Pakistan.
The outlet quoted that the Iranian delegation as saying: “We received direct threats while enroute to Islamabad that our plane might be attacked,” prompting heightened caution during and after the visit.
“On our way back, we did not fly to Tehran. It’s a very long story, but we all believed that there was a significant chance that they would shoot down our plane, that they would fire a missile at our plane,” Marandi said.
He explained that on the way back from the talks, the Iranian delegation “secretly got into a different plane, and that plane on the way to Tehran suddenly diverted and landed very swiftly in Mashhad. And then we all came to Tehran by train, by car, and by bus.
“We don’t trust the United States,” Marandi told Al-Mayadeen on Tuesday, “and we are also being very busy preparing ourselves for the next round of war.”
Iran “always knew the United States was deceitful,” he continued, adding that the regime is bolstering its military capabilities “while we are at the negotiating table.”
According to reports, as also indicated by US President Donald Trump, the negotiating teams from the two countries may return to Pakistan later this week to resume negotiations to end the war in West Asia, days after the first peace talks ended without a breakthrough.
Reports said a proposal had been sent to Washington and Tehran for the delegations to return to Islamabad to resume discussions. No date had yet been decided, but both countries could return as early as the end of this week.
An official at the Iranian Embassy in Islamabad said, “The coming rounds of talks can come sometime later this week or earlier next week. But nothing is finalised as of now.”
A senior Pakistani official said Islamabad had reached out to Iran, “and we got a positive response that they will be open to a second round of talks.”
Islamabad was communicating with both sides about the timing of the next round, and the meeting would be likely to take place over the coming weekend.
Last weekend’s meeting in Pakistan’s capital to resolve the conflict between the US and Iran, held four days after the announcement of a ceasefire, reached no breakthrough. It was the first direct encounter between the US and Iranian officials in more than a decade and the most senior engagement since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
