The White House said on Monday it was seeing indications Iran was cooperating with inspectors from the UN nuclear watchdog and credited tough international sanctions over Tehran's nuclear program.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked about the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspection of the Parchin military complex and its report of "significant progress" in its investigation of Iran's past nuclear activity, saying it "disproves the claims of our critics," who said Iran would be conducting self-inspections.



Earnest said that as time goes forward, there will be "many opportunities" to show that the warnings of those who opposed the deal "are eventually disproven based on the way the agreement is implemented."

"For a long time Iran had resisted cooperating with any sort of inspections IAEA wanted to do," Earnest told reporters.

"And as a result of the international pressure that built up over time, principally because of the tough economic sanctions that the United States put in place and got the rest of the international community to go along with, we now see indications that Iran is cooperating with IAEA inspections."

Open gallery view International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Yukiya Amano (L) shakes hand with Iran's President Hassan Rouhani during their meeting in Tehran, September 20, 2015. Credit: Reuters

Head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, paid what Iran's official news agency described as a ceremonial visit Sunday to the Parchin site that he suspects may have been used to develop explosive triggers for nuclear weapons.

Neither Iranian reports of Amano's visit to Parchin nor its confirmation by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency gave substantial details.

Open gallery view The Parchin military complex. Credit: AP

But they appeared to jibe with the terms of a draft agreement between Iran and the IAEA, which Amano heads. Seen by The Associated Press, that confidential draft speaks of a visit by Amano not as a participant in any IAEA probe but as a "courtesy" granted by Iran.

The draft also postulates that Amano would come only after the suspected site at Parchin was probed for evidence of weapons work. His visit Sunday thus could indicate that the inspection had already occurred over the past few days.

Such a probe would normally be done by IAEA personnel. But the draft says that at Parchin, Iranian experts, monitored by video and photo cameras, will collect their own environmental samples. They will then give them to IAEA officials for laboratory analysis.

The Parchin compromise comes less than a month before an Oct. 15 deadline for the IAEA to gather information on allegations that Iran tried to build atomic weapons and after more than a decade of essentially stalemated agency attempts to follow up the allegations.

A final UN assessment is due in December, and that will feed into the larger July 14 nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, helping to determine whether sanctions on Tehran will be lifted.