Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar met Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek on Tuesday, in what the Foreign Office described as a warm exchange (Dawn; Express Tribune).
Dar said that dialogue and diplomacy remain essential to promoting peace and stability in the region, and that sincere implementation by both parties to the conflict of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding of June 2026 remains the only way forward.
What the Islamabad MoU is
The MoU, signed in June, set out a framework for ending the war that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February. It followed mediation in which Pakistan took part, and an April ceasefire between the United States and Iran.
That ceasefire has not held cleanly. Sporadic attacks, concentrated around the Strait of Hormuz, have repeatedly set back prospects of a final settlement — including the US strike on Iranian launchers on Larak Island at the weekend and the Iranian missile response against American bases in Jordan.
Why the timing matters
Dar’s intervention lands on the same day Iran’s armed forces warned that any fresh American attack would draw a much heavier response, and hours after President Masoud Pezeshkian, also at the Bishkek summit, said Tehran would reciprocate immediately if Washington returned to its commitments under the interim deal.
Pakistan chairs the SCO Council of Heads of State this year, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif travelled to Bishkek at the weekend to take up the chair. That gives Islamabad a platform in the room with both Tehran and Beijing at a moment when the Hormuz shipping lane — through which a large share of Pakistan’s own imported crude passes — is again under threat.
No date was announced for further Pakistan-Iran talks.
[Image: Dar embracing Araghchi at the SCO Council of Heads of State meeting in Bishkek, Foreign Office handout, via Dawn.]
[Image: Foreign Office handout via Express Tribune]
