The president confirmed direct backchannel talks with the IRGC while demanding that Tehran ‘put up the white flag of surrender.’
President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to bomb Oman if it interferes with U.S. efforts to enforce a blockade on Iranian shipping, escalating pressure on the Gulf nation as it negotiates with Tehran over a new route through the Strait of Hormuz.
“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the [expletive] out of them,” Trump told Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst in a phone interview on Aug. 17.
The warning came as a 60-day negotiating window tied to a tentative U.S.–Iran cease-fire framework expired Monday without an agreement to end the war or fully reopen the strait.
Trump said Iran should “put up the white flag of surrender,” while insisting he had no timetable for further military action.
“I’m not in a hurry,” Trump said, adding that the approaching U.S. midterm elections had “nothing to do with my thinking.”
The president also confirmed that Washington was communicating with officials from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in a “direct backchannel.”
“They’re good poker players, but they’re dying,” Trump said.
Trump has repeatedly said that talks are in fact taking place with Iranian officials despite Tehran’s strenuous denials.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei on Monday denied reports of secret contacts between Washington and IRGC leaders, calling them a fabrication intended to divide Iran’s political and military leadership.
“News of a secret meeting between Iran and the U.S. in Erbil is totally fabricated,” Baghaei said at a Monday press briefing, according to Iranian state-run news agency IRNA.
Baghaei said that a June memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran did not impose a firm 60-day deadline. Rather, it envisaged 60 days of negotiations on sanctions relief and Iran’s nuclear program, with a possible extension if no agreement was reached.
He said those talks never began because Washington had violated the memorandum weeks after it was signed, rendering the negotiating timetable moot.
Trump, meanwhile, renewed his demand that Iran never be permitted to possess a nuclear weapon “in any way.”
By Tom Ozimek
