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“At least three Syrians were killed, including two members of the crew,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
It was not clear who carried out the attack. “We don’t know if this was an Israeli attack,” Abdel Rahman told AFP, adding that “the Iranian tanker came from Iran and was not far from Banias port”.
Also not clear was whether a drone or a missile was used in the attack, the Observatory said.
2.3 US ‘hands Iran three categories of sanctions in Vienna nuclear deal talks’
The US has provided Iran with examples of three categories of existing sanctions in the indirect talks in Vienna aimed at reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, The Washington Post reported on April 22.
They were specified as those the Biden administration would need to lift on Tehran to return to compliance with the nuclear deal (also known as the JCPOA), those it is not prepared to lift and “difficult cases”.
The newspaper said it obtained the categories communicated to Iran via third party negotiators—who have been shuttling between the US and Iranian delegations in the Austrian capital during two rounds of talks, the second round of which ended earlier this week—from a US State Department official.
Negotiations were now reportedly focused on reaching agreement on a full list of actions each side is prepared to take to comply with the terms of the JCPOA.
“The parties are not going to agree to anything until they see the full picture,” the senior official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the State Department, was cited as saying. “Nothing will be agreed until everything is agreed,” they added.
US and European officials have let it be known that progress has been made in the talks, though there are no substantive breakthroughs. “There are so many things that need to be resolved. I think at this very interim beginning step it is: What can we put on the table to show good faith and confidence building?” the Post reported a Western diplomat, who also asked to remain unnamed, as saying.
The talks are expected to resume in Vienna next week. Participants include Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. They remain signatories to the nuclear agreement, as does Iran, although Tehran has in the past year been gradually breaching the deal to a greater and greater degree, arguing that it gets little benefit from the pact when the European signatories do nothing meaningful to protect Iran’s economy from the swingeing sanctions brought in by former US president Donald Trump from 2018. Trump unilaterally pulled Washington out of the JCPOA in May of that year and imposed sanctions that, for example, essentially freeze Iran out of the international economic system. One of his arguments for doing so was that the deal is not tight enough to stop Iran moving its civilian nuclear development programme into the military sphere. Tehran, however, has always claimed it has never pursued the building of a nuclear weapon.
8 IRAN Country Report May 2021 www.intellinews.com