Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi announced that nuclear talks with the United States are scheduled to take place in the Omani capital, Muscat, on Friday morning.
In a post published on his account on the “X” platform on Wednesday evening, Araqchi expressed his thanks to Omani officials for “making all the necessary arrangements” to host the negotiations.
British news agency Reuters quoted a U.S. official as saying that “U.S.-Iranian talks will be held in Oman on Friday.”
In the same context, the U.S. website Axios cited American officials as saying that “plans for U.S.-Iran nuclear talks in Oman on Friday are back on track after several Arab and Muslim leaders urgently pressed the administration of President Donald Trump today not to follow through on threats to walk away from dialogue.”
According to the American officials, at least nine countries from the region conveyed messages to the highest levels of the Trump administration, strongly urging the United States not to cancel the meeting in Oman.
One U.S. official told the website: “They asked us to keep the meeting and listen to what the Iranians have to say. We told the Arabs that we would hold the meeting if they insisted, but we are extremely skeptical.”
Iranian and American media reported that the negotiations would be held in Muscat following a wave of press leaks that spoke of an imminent collapse of the Iranian-American talks.
Iran had demanded on Tuesday that the talks be moved from Istanbul to the Sultanate of Oman and limited to a bilateral framework, with the aim of focusing exclusively on the nuclear file and excluding other issues such as missiles, which the United States and its regional allies consider among their priorities.
In this regard, Axios quoted U.S. officials as saying that “the United States studied the Iranian request before deciding to reject it definitively on Wednesday.”
According to the website, a senior U.S. official said: “We told them the choice was to accept the agreed format or nothing. Their response was: ‘Okay, then nothing.’”
Axios also reported that U.S. officials said Washington informed Tehran on Wednesday that it would not agree to Iran’s demand to change the venue and format of the talks scheduled for Friday.
The officials added, according to the American website, that “plans for nuclear talks between the United States and Iran were on the verge of collapse after Washington rejected Tehran’s demands to change the location and format of the meeting scheduled for Friday.”
Meanwhile, Iran’s Tasnim news agency quoted an informed source as saying that the existing dispute does not concern changing the venue of the negotiations, stressing that the U.S. side continues to repeatedly alter its positions and statements.
The source explained that diplomacy and negotiation require clarity, consistency in positions, and seriousness in engagement, not continuous changes dictated by currents that call for war and are linked to the Zionist enemy entity.
