The Iranian flag waves in front of the IAEA headquarters before the beginning of a board of governors meeting, in Vienna, Austria, March 1, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Lisi Niesner

Iran’s foreign ministry said indirect, EU-mediated talks between Tehran and Washington in the Qatari capital were proceeding in a “serious” atmosphere, denying an earlier report that they had ended.

The talks are aimed at overcoming differences over how to salvage a 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and world powers.

Earlier, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency had reported that the negotiations in Doha had ended without result.

“The two-day talks are not over yet and later today Iran’s top nuclear negotiator and the EU’s envoy Enrique Mora will meet again,” ministry spokesman Naser Kanani said, according to Iranian state media.

“Talks continue in a serious and business-like atmosphere.”

The talks started on Tuesday with Mora as the coordinator, shuttling between Iran’s Ali Bagheri Kani and Washington’s special Iran envoy Rob Malley. They are trying to break a months-long impasse that has stalled negotiations in Vienna to reinstate the 2015 pact.

“What prevented these negotiations from coming to fruition is the US insistence on its proposed draft text in Vienna that excludes any guarantee for Iran’s economic benefits,” Tasnim said, citing informed sources at the talks.

Then-US President Donald Trump withdrew from the pact in 2018 and reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran’s economy. A year later, Tehran reacted by gradually breaching nuclear limits of the deal.

Over 11 months of talks between Tehran and major powers to revive their nuclear deal stalled in March, chiefly over Tehran’s insistence that Washington remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), its elite security force, from the US Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list.