Pakistan's Army Chief Leaves Tehran Without a Breakthrough: Iran Sets Preconditions on the Blockade and Sanctions as U.S. Central Command Calls the Tanker Mine Claims False
Pakistan's army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, visited Tehran on Tuesday and met Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf as he sought to revive talks between the United States and Iran, according to Reuters and other reporting. Pakistan has played a key mediating role between Washington and Tehran this year, and Munir carried a new proposal from Pakistani and Qatari mediators aiming to find middle ground on Iran's nuclear program and its frozen assets; The New Arab reported that the proposal had drawn positive responses from U.S. and Iranian officials.
But Munir appears to have left Tehran empty-handed on Tuesday, according to Foreign Exchanges' roundup of the day's reporting: the common message from Iranian officials was that Tehran does not trust the United States to negotiate in good faith and will not seriously re-engage in diplomacy unless Washington first meets its preconditions, including ending its naval blockade and lifting sanctions. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi had said at a joint news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday that regional issues should be resolved through diplomacy, blamed the United States for insecurity and tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, and called for a joint regional security arrangement without foreign forces.
Accounts of the strait itself continued to diverge: Iran's Revolutionary Guards said more tankers had struck mines and caught fire in the southern strait, while a U.S. Central Command spokesman said Iran's mine claims were false, according to Newsquawk as cited in the Straits Daily brief. The Guards also claimed to have shot down a U.S. MQ-9 drone over the strait, described as its 54th such shootdown, with no U.S. military corroboration in the reporting. Shipping data showed the waterway nearly shut: IMF PortWatch recorded just 4 vessel transits on October 18, against a pre-crisis baseline of about 85 per day.
In oil markets, Brent crude stood at $107.09 a barrel as of 15:09 UTC on Tuesday, down 1.04% over 24 hours, after earlier touching a five-month high above $111. Crude flows through the strait have fallen sharply over the past two weeks, U.S. emergency oil reserves have dropped to their lowest since 1982, and analytics firm Kpler has reported at least 18 attacks on vessels in the past two weeks.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 霍尔木兹海峡卫星资料图。图：美国国家航空航天局（NASA，STS-4 任务拍摄），公共领域，经维基共享资源。 / File satellite image of the Strait of Hormuz. Image by NASA (STS-4 mission), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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