TEHRAN (The Thursday Times) — Field Marshal Asim Munir traveled to Tehran on Monday for his third visit to Iran this year, as Pakistan’s mediation between the United States and Iran entered one of its most fraught stretches since the war between them began roughly six months ago.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry, not Islamabad, announced the trip, an unusual reversal spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei framed as building on Pakistan’s efforts to “help strengthen peace and security in the region.” The visit follows two phone calls in four days between Munir and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, on Wednesday and Saturday, in which Iranian state media said the two discussed regional developments and ways to strengthen “peace, stability and security” in West Asia.
The trip lands at a genuinely difficult moment for the mediation effort Pakistan has led since the war began. The 60-day window set out in the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, signed by Pakistan, Iran and the US on June 17, lapsed in mid-August with neither side agreeing to extend it. Iran has kept the Strait of Hormuz closed, insisting Washington first lift its naval blockade, end oil sanctions, unfreeze Iranian assets abroad and halt military threats, conditions Tehran says the US has not met. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi traveled to Tehran earlier this month to try to revive the stalled push and returned without concrete results.
Munir’s visit also coincides with fresh American economic pressure. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is due to detail on Monday what American officials have called the “toughest sanctions in history” against Iran, a package he has said is intended, alongside the continuing naval blockade, to collapse the government in Tehran. Iran’s Foreign Ministry has called the plan “economic warfare.”
This is Munir’s third trip to Tehran in 2026. His first came in April, days after the Islamabad Talks, the first direct US-Iran negotiations in more than four decades, ended without a breakthrough. He returned in May, arriving hours after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there had been “slight progress” in talks between Washington and Tehran. Monday’s visit is expected to also touch on this month’s Mecca Joint Defence Agreement between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye, which Munir attended in person, and which commits the three signatories to treat an attack on any one of them as an attack on all.
The stakes carry a personal dimension for Islamabad this time. Yemen’s Houthi fighters, whose attacks on shipping have repeatedly threatened to widen the conflict and who are widely believed to receive Iranian support, are expected to feature in Munir’s talks after three Pakistani sailors were killed and several wounded when Houthi forces struck a Tanzania-flagged commercial vessel in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait on August 11. Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar called the attack a violation of international law and strongly condemned it at the time.
Munir is expected to meet Iran’s newly appointed senior military leadership during the visit, including Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps chief Major-General Ahmad Vahidi, Chief of General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major-General Ali Abdollahi, and the new Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaei, all appointed earlier this month. Tensions elsewhere in the region have sharpened in parallel: the United Arab Emirates suspended trade and financial transactions with Iran last week after saying it had come under fire from two ballistic missiles launched from Iranian territory, a claim Baghaei denied. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Albusaidi, who has also held recent calls with Araghchi, is separately scheduled to visit Tehran on Tuesday.
Analysts remain divided on how much any single visit can realistically deliver, though most credit Pakistan’s position as uniquely useful. Qamar Cheema, head of the Islamabad-based Sanober Institute, argued Pakistan’s lack of any personal stake is precisely what makes it valuable to both sides. “Both sides see Pakistan as a country that has helped facilitate dialogue without any personal stake in the outcome, nothing to gain for itself,” he told Al Jazeera. “That gives it a certain clarity, and the ability to offer an off-ramp to everyone involved.” Zahid Mehmood, a retired two-star general and Pakistani defence strategist, was more emphatic still, describing Munir as still carrying Washington’s own offer to Tehran. “Pakistan is still carrying, in effect, Washington’s off-ramp to Tehran,” he said. “The country remains the most trusted conduit available. Pakistan is really the only exit card available to either side.” Some analysts weigh Qatar’s parallel channel more heavily than Pakistan’s, but few dispute that Islamabad’s access to Iran’s security establishment, an increasingly important audience as the IRGC’s role in Tehran’s decision-making grows, is real and distinctive.
Iranian officials framed Monday’s visit in unambiguous terms of their own. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei told state broadcaster IRIB that the trip was taking place as bilateral ties between Islamabad and Tehran “reach one of their strongest stages,” and clarified that Munir’s visit was unrelated to the parallel visit of Oman’s foreign minister, though both, he said, would address regional security issues. For a relationship built on more than seven decades of diplomatic ties, that is itself a notable marker, even amid a war Pakistan has spent six months working to end.
