US negotiations with Iran set to resume: Report

Negotiations between the US and Iran are set to resume after Iranian officials privately acknowledged firing on ships in the Strait of Hormuz was a "mistake," ABC News reported Friday, citing US officials.

"They have come back to us and asked for further talks to try to settle some of the issues," one US official said. "We are hoping to get to a place where they publicly say that they will stop shooting at ships and sort of explicitly or at least implicitly acknowledging that they screwed up. We're working on that now."

According to the report, the senior US official later added: "So they came back to the table and said: 'We screwed up. We made a mistake. Let's keep talking.'"

Earlier this week, US President Donald Trump said the Iranians had said they wanted to return to talks, but later Iran denied this. Trump also said that even if the talks resume, the ceasefire was “over.”

The US official added that Trump "has directed" teams to talk but added that if Iran keeps on "shooting at ships or if they engage in any other hostile act, then we're going to hit them back."

US points to ‘fractured’ Iranian leadership

The other US official also offered insight into recent strikes on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, saying it came from "an errant part" of the Iranian system that "was trying to undermine the deal" the two countries reached last month.

Another official said the strikes illustrated the fractured Iranian political system, split between what the US termed “hardliners” and “rational people.”

"We have a lot of options if the hardliners get the upper hand. But we continue to have some confidence that the rational people in their system will be able to rein in those hardliners. You never know. You can't predict the future," the official said.

Despite those increased hostilities, a different senior US official said that they think that "Iran is showing a lot of signs of wanting to make this deal."

Senior US officials also said that the US is demanding that Iran issue a public statement that "acknowledges all channels of the Strait of Hormuz are open and they're not shooting at ships anymore."

One US official reportedly said that one of the key results they're expecting is that Iran will agree that the Strait of Hormuz will be open in the same way it was before the conflict.

According to the report, a US official said that the question of nuclear dust "still very much is on the table," adding that the nuclear materials are key to the deal.