WASHINGTON, DC – US President Donald Trump’s top envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner will head to Geneva this week for talks with Iranian negotiators over Tehran’s nuclear program, the White House confirmed on Sunday.
A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to AFP that the two men, who have been Trump’s lead Iran negotiators, would represent Washington for the talks.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi will represent Tehran in the negotiations, his ministry reported earlier. He will also meet with his Swiss and Omani counterparts and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Tehran and Washington restarted negotiations in Muscat on February 6, months after previous talks collapsed when Israel launched an unprecedented bombing campaign against Iran last June that started a 12-day war.
The United States joined that war, carrying out strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iran said the Geneva talks would be “indirect,” as the previous round in Oman had been.
The latest talks came with Washington having threatened Tehran with military action and deploying an aircraft carrier group to the region following Iran’s deadly crackdown on anti-government protests last month.
After the Iran talks, Witkoff and Kushner are expected to participate in US-brokered talks between Russia and Ukraine in Geneva.
In Paris, meanwhile, some residents of Tehran chanted slogans during the weekend against the clerical leadership from balconies and windows, reports said, a day after Iranians abroad staged giant opposition rallies in Europe and North America.
The Islamic republic under supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was shaken by a protest movement that peaked in January and which according to rights groups was repressed by security forces in a crackdown that left thousands dead.
While the street protests have petered out in the face of the crackdown, last week residents of Tehran and other cities began shouting slogans against the leadership from the relative safety of their own homes inside vast apartment blocks.
In a new night of chants, residents of the eastern Tehran district of Ekbatan on Sunday shouted “death to Khamenei”, “death to the Islamic republic” and “long live the shah”, according to the Shahrak Ekbatan social media account which monitors the area.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah ousted by the Islamic revolution, had urged people inside the country to stage such actions in parallel with protests abroad over the weekend.
Police in the southern German city of Munich said 250,000 people attended a rally there Saturday which in an unusual move was personally addressed by Pahlavi.
Other major pro-monarchy rallies were held in diaspora strongholds including Los Angeles and Toronto.
Pahlavi’s office said on X that over a million people had attended such rallies worldwide but it was not immediately possible to confirm the figure.
Speaking in Munich, Pahlavi hailed the rally as the biggest such in years and said he was ready to lead a transition in Iran.
Monarchist supporters were also gladdened by an extremely rare public appearance at the rally by his sole surviving full sibling, his sister the former princess Farahnaz.
Persian-language TV channel Iran International, which is based outside Iran, reported similar actions taking place in other parts of Tehran Sunday, broadcasting images of people chanting “this is the final battle, Pahlavi is coming back” and “death to the Guards” in reference to the authorities’ ideological army the Revolutionary Guards.
Slogans hostile to the authorities were also chanted in other cities including Shiraz in the south and Arak in the centre of the country, it added.
It was not immediately possible for AFP to verify the videos.
The new actions come two days ahead of talks on Tuesday between the US and Iran focused on the Iranian nuclear programme in Geneva which are seen as crucial to determining if Washington goes ahead with military action against Tehran.
According to the latest toll issued by the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, over 7,000 people were killed during the protests, the vast majority protesters shot dead by security forces. Almost 54,000 people have been arrested in a crackdown that is ongoing, it added.
