Vance, who led the negotiations for a short-lived truce in June, will also meet Al-Thani, whose country has been a prime mediator since early in the war, conveying messages between the sides and proposing ways to bridge their differences.
Anxiety over the war has pervaded the region for months and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday he had told Trump that Ankara did not want to see a new escalation.
“We emphasise at every opportunity that it is possible to resolve these issues through dialogue and diplomacy. Unfortunately, we see a negative shift once again. We are doing our utmost to prevent this,” Erdogan told reporters.
MILITARY ACTION
Sunday night’s strikes on Qeshm island did not impact vital infrastructure or services, a provincial official told Iran‘s semi-official Fars news agency on Monday. The US has not commented on the Iranian media reports.
A senior Iranian source told Reuters that US strikes were targeting Iranian radar systems serving both air defence and ship navigation, as well as bases for missile launchers and mine-laying systems.
Attacks on tankers in the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz ramped up sharply in October and have continued at the highest rate since the start of the war, figures from international maritime agencies showed last week.
Iran, which typically does not acknowledge striking vessels that report being hit by projectiles, said on Sunday a tanker had hit a mine east of the Strait of Hormuz.
A state television reporter said on Monday that 11 tankers had been “disabled” over the past 10 days.
The war has triggered a global energy shortage, prompted Iranian strikes on Gulf Arab countries, spilled over into a major Israeli offensive in Lebanon during the spring and summer and reignited Yemen’s long-frozen civil war.
On Sunday Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthi group said it had struck an office building of Saudi state oil company Aramco in Riyadh. The attack blew out windows across several floors of a building in the city’s financial district. The Energy Ministry acknowledged damage from an attempted attack on the building without assigning responsibility.
