Iranian President Hassan Rouhani held a phone conversation with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, during which he urged Paris to give guarantees on banking channels and oil sales as well as in the field of insurance and transportation. According to the Iranian state-run INRA news agency, Rouhani told Macron that “Iran has acted upon all its promises in the nuclear agreement and, with attention to the one-sided withdrawal of America … expects the remaining partners to operate their programs more quickly and transparently.” While the French leader reaffirmed to his Iranian counterpart Paris’s commitment to maintain the 2015 nuclear agreement, Macron once again reiterated his earlier calls for broader discussions with all relevant parties that would include Iran’s nuclear program after 2025, its ballistics program and its malign activities in the wider Middle East region – a demand the Islamic Republic vehemently denies.
In response to the Iranian report of their phone conversation, President Emmanuel Macron announced in an annual speech to France’s diplomatic core that Paris “will do everything so that the talks help avoid a serious crisis in the months ahead.” On the matter of Syria, the French President stressed that keeping President Bashar al-Assad in power in Syria would be a “disastrous mistake,” although noting that it was not France’s duty to assign the country’s future leader. “If I was considering from the beginning that the primary enemy was Islamic State, it’s that I never made the ousting of Bashar al-Assad a preliminary condition for our diplomatic and humanitarian actions. I think that such scenario would nonetheless be a disastrous mistake. Who provoked the flow of these millions of refugees? Who massacred his own people? It is not up to France to designate Syria’s future leader, no more than any other country. But it is our task and in our interest to make sure that the Syrian people are well in a position to do it,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.
Macron further warned that the present situation in Syria is alarming, because the regime threatens to create a new humanitarian tragedy in the country’s northern region, Idlib. “The present situation is alarming, because the regime threatens to create a new humanitarian tragedy in the Idlib region. Until now, they have shown no desire to negotiate at the very least a political transition. This again involves reinforcing the pressure on the regime and on its allies, and in this regard, I expect a lot from Russia and Turkey, considering their role and their commitments,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.