U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tapped the personal relationship he has formed with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif in the three years of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, speaking with him at least five times by telephone.
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Such an announcement would mean the United Nations atomic energy watchdog has found Iran to have met its obligations to curb its nuclear program.
And while video surfaced on Iranian television purportedly showing one of the US sailors apologizing for the incident, the State Department maintains Kerry never offered an apology to Zarif on behalf of the USA government, and merely offered explanations for how the situation unfolded.
“You don’t put two 50-foot patrol boats at the tip of the spear”, Harmer said.
Officials said the sailors were part of Riverine Squadron 1 based in San Diego and were deployed to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain.
“We’re all relieved to learn this morning that the sailors have been released”, Royce said.
Iran has released 10 US Navy sailors who were detained when their vessels strayed into Iranian waters. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive incident publicly.
Despite his claim that there had been a call for a USA apology, Fadavi also struck a conciliatory note, saying that Iran had concluded that “this trespassing was not hostile or for spying purposes” and that the sailors had been in Iranian territory “due to a broken navigation system”. “The Navy will investigate the circumstances that led to the sailors’ presence in Iran”.
“We still have four hostages over there”, he said.
In his statement, Kerry expressed his “gratitude to Iranian authorities for their cooperation?in swiftly resolving this matter”.
Radio contact was lost with the two vessels – which USA officials said were riverine patrol boats under 20 metres in length – while they were en route from Kuwait to Bahrain.
The incursion was “unintentional”, a statement from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards quoted by state media said.
What could have become a tense global incident instead was quickly resolved through USA and Iranian diplomacy, a sign of what’s at stake in the Persian Gulf, said retired Navy Cmdr.
Attempts by the administration of President Barack Obama to downplay the significance of Iran’s seizure of two American naval boats and their crews on Tuesday underscore the degree to which the nuclear deal with Iran holds the president’s foreign policy legacy hostage, Josh Rogin and Eli Lake wrote in an analysis for Bloomberg View on Tuesday.
In March 2007, Iranian forces seized 15 British servicemen in the mouth of a waterway separating Iran and Iraq.
The Obama administration portrayed the outcome as a diplomatic victory; critics of the Iran nuclear deal considered the whole affair indicative of the risks in letting a longtime pariah back into the global fold.
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She further stated, regarding the sanctions relief Iran gets under the deal, “I think it’s really important for the American people to realize though, that the money that is being released is Iranian money held in banks, other banks, not in U.S. banks”.
