Posted on 08/22/2014 5:10:19 PM PDT by Dave346
TEHRAN: Iran is ready to join international action against jihadists in Iraq provided the West lifts crippling sanctions, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Thursday.
His comments followed a call by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius Wednesday for all countries in the region, including Iran, to join the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) fighters who have seized swath of Iraq as well as neighboring Syria.
"If we agree to do something in Iraq, the other side of the negotiations should do something in return," the official IRNA news agency quoted Zarif as saying.
"All the sanctions that are related to Iran's nuclear program should be lifted," he said.
It is the first time that Iran has explicitly linked its readiness to work with the West in Iraq with a lifting of the crippling EU and U.S. sanctions imposed over its nuclear program.
Those sanctions are the subject of ongoing talks between Tehran and the major powers that are due to resume before the opening of the U.N. General Assembly next month.
In return for lifting the sanctions, the Western powers are demanding that Iran sharply rein in its nuclear program to ally international concerns about its ambitions as part of a comprehensive deal they are seeking to strike by November.
The Iranian foreign ministry confirmed Wednesday that discussions were under way with several European governments about the possibility of joint action against ISIS in Iraq.
Zarif said tough negotiations were still under way over what role Iran might play in Iraq and what the reward might be for its cooperation.
"It is still not clear what we have to do in Iraq and what they have to do in return," the Mehr news agency quoted the Iranian foreign minister as saying.
"And that's exactly the difficult part."
Iranian and U.S. officials discussed the jihadists' lightning offensive in Iraq in June on the sidelines of nuclear talks with the major powers but both sides ruled out joint military action at the time.
Tehran and Washington have had no diplomatic relations since the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, although they have had contacts over Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
Might as well get Obama to give them something for doing what they are going to do anyway.
I smell a Jar-RAT.
Well, what can we do? It doesn’t seem like we can afford to carry all the water there by keeping troops, operating recon flights or conducting 911 airstrikes at the Kurd or Iraq beck-and-call. Leveraging Shiite fury at ISIS seems like a smart idea. We have to get disengaged out of these battles between peoples who hate one another.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
..................
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
