Iran's Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni met Pakistan's Army chief, General Asim Munir, in Islamabad on his second visit to the country in ten days, according to a Reuters account published on 25 July, with China separately pushing the same track1. A Pakistani official said a halt to attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states is now a precondition for talks to resume2.
Momeni is an unusual envoy for a nuclear-adjacent negotiation. Interior ministers run police forces, not foreign policy; his standing here comes from being described as close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which means Islamabad is talking to the institution that fires the missiles rather than the ministry that signs the paper. Pakistan has held this brokerage before, and it inherits the file from a Qatar, Egypt, Pakistan and Oman ceasefire plan submitted on 22 July that produced no truce.
The Baghdad channel needs a clarification we owe readers. Ali al-Zaidi's visit to Tehran on 23 July is not in dispute: his own statement and Iranian state coverage place the Iraqi prime minister at Saadabad Palace with President Masoud Pezeshkian, signing agreements on transport, rail construction, a Tehran-Baghdad sister-city arrangement and public administration. What Baghdad's media office called "completely baseless" is the narrower New York Times claim that he carried a US ceasefire proposal and that Iran rejected it. Tehran has never confirmed that claim either, and Press TV's own coverage records neither side confirming messages passing through Washington.
Islamabad's precondition lasted hours. Houthi missiles reached Jazan and Yanbu the same morning it was conveyed, an escalation Iran supplies personnel to and does not fully command3. A mediator whose entry condition can be broken by a third party it does not control has bought itself a channel that any Houthi launch officer can close, which is the structural weakness of routing this war's diplomacy through a state with leverage in Tehran and none in Sanaa.
