Foreign secretary says west and Iran can have more realistic discussion about finding solution to the conflict after embassy reopens in Tehran

The UK foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, has said that “a new phase” has been entered in the search for a resolution to the Syrian conflict with the thawing of relations between the west and Iran paving the way for possible talks.



Hammond spoke on Monday after meeting the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, on the second day of a two-day trip to Iran, during which he opened the UK embassy after a four-year closure. He said Iran and Britain were keen to use the conclusion of an agreement on the former’s nuclear programme in July as an opportunity to discuss Syria and other regional issues.

He said: “Up to now, we’ve been having a discussion among ourselves in the west, without the two most important and influential players in Syria – Iran and Russia – being in the room. That may be very gratifying to us, but it is not going to get us to a political solution. If we’re going to get to a political solution, we need to have the Iranians and Russians in the process as well.”

Hammond said the level of talks with Russia on the Syrian war had deepened in recent months and now Iran was at the table as well. “Now we’ve got the opportunity for Iran to be engaged in that discussion with us and that makes it a more realistic discussion, so I think there is a new phase.

“That isn’t to say that it throws up instant solutions. In fact, in the early stages of the new phase it serves to underscore the depths of the differences between us on the one hand and the Iranians and the Russians on the other. But if you don’t talk you can’t make progress, and we are now talking.”

He said the principal disagreement remained the future of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with Iran seeing him as “the glue that holds much of Syria together” while the UK believes “that a man with so much blood on his hands cannot be part of the country’s future”.

Rouhani received Hammond at the presidential palace on Monday morning and said he welcomed the reopening of the British embassy. Hammond said later there was no time to get into a detailed discussion on Syria, but he held talks with the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on Sunday, and the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, Ali Shamkani, on Monday.

He said: “What we have identified today is quite a bit of misunderstanding of each other’s positions. That inevitably occurs when you don’t talk to each other. At least now having our embassies open, having channels of dialogue open, means we are going to get a growing understanding of the Iranian positions and what their red lines are.”

It was Hammond’s first visit to Iran and the first by a British foreign secretary in 12 years. He said the two days of talks with Iranian leaders had helped break down assumptions and stereotypes on both sides.

Hammond said: “My personal impression, never having been to Iran before, is that I suspect many people in Britain and the west will have had an image of Iran as a desperately theocratic, deeply religious society motivated by ideology. “But what I’ve seen is a perfectly normal, bustling, dynamic, entrepreneurial, thrusting, middle-income developing world city that has clearly enormous potential; not a regimented, disciplined society under the thumb of the authority.

“One of the things that struck me most was that our police escorts as they’ve driven us around the city have struggled to persuade Iranian motorists and motorcyclists to do their bidding. I don’t get the impression of a population cowed by authority.”

He said of the Iranian perspective: “I also detect a change in the approach, the language, the rhetoric around the UK. I sense we are seen now more as part of Europe ... and less of the imperial Britain of the past with its legacy of involvement in Iran and the region.”

Hammond visited the Commonwealth war cemetery in Gholhak Garden, the embassy’s second compound, in northern Tehran. Although the compound was occupied by radicals during the embassy invasion in November 2011, the graves were left untouched. A British diplomat said: “They were very respectful of the cemetery.”