United States President Donald Trump has said that Washington is engaged in “productive” talks with Iran. Publicly, Iranian officials have rejected Trump’s claims, calling them fake news designed to ease oil prices.Behind the scenes, Egypt, Turkiye and Pakistan have established an indirect channel of communication between American and Iranian officials in the past few days, two senior diplomatic sources in the region told Al Jazeera. Still, regardless of the small window for diplomacy that may have emerged, experts remain sceptical over the prospects for a ceasefire as the positions of the warring parties remain far apart.The Iranian leadership’s stance on what concessions to extract from the US appears to have hardened since the start of the war on February 28, when the US and Israel attacked Iran, killing its then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.The US and Israel insist that their nonstop attacks since then have significantly “degraded” Iran’s military capabilities – the Pentagon says 90 percent of Iran’s missile capacity has been wiped out. But Iran has shown it can still fire when it wants, and with precision.In the Strait of Hormuz – a waterway through which a fifth of global oil exports pass – hundreds of vessels remain paralysed. And across the regio …
