Iran on Monday dropped the demand that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) be removed from the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, according to reports. A senior US official told CNN that, in a response to a draft nuclear deal proposed by the European Union, Iran no longer insisted on the United States delisting the IRGC and several companies tied to the IRGC. “The current version of the text, and what they are demanding, drops it,” the official said. “So if we are closer to a deal, that’s why.” The Trump Administration put the IRGC on the terrorist list in 2019 as part of its “maximum pressure” campaign against the Islamic Republic. The current US administration has maintained former President Donald Trump’s policy, with President Joe Biden as recently as last month saying he would not remove the group from the terrorist list.
Removing the IRGC from the list of foreign terrorist organizations was never a “precondition or key demand” of Iran, Mohammad Marandi, an adviser to the Iranian team in the Vienna talks, said in a tweet on Saturday. Marandi said he had pointed this out often over the past few months, adding, “If the United States needs to say this to sell the deal, that’s their business.” Tehran, he said, would likewise keep the US Central Command (CENTCOM) on its terror list. Iranian authorities designated CENTCOM a terrorist group in a tit-for-tit move responding to the US inclusion of the IRGC on its terrorist list, which Iran terms an “illegal and unwise move from the United States.”
Among the sticking points that remain between the sides: Washington’s refusal to cave on Tehran’s demand that compensation be provided if a future US president pulls out of the deal, as then-President Trump did in 2018, and that an International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into its nuclear program be shut down.