How Pakistan mediated a US-Iran agreement after more than 100 days of war

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif says there were moments in the final stretch of negotiations between the United States and Iran when the talks appeared close to collapse.

Each time, he told the National Assembly on Monday, it was Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s powerful military chief, who kept the deliberations alive.

“Throughout this period, he was awake all day and night,” Sharif told lawmakers, adding that Munir had “sacrificed day and night to extinguish the flames of war”.

There were many moments, he said, when “it felt like the negotiations would come to a halt” but the army chief did not give up. “If this journey had not continued,” Sharif said, “the dream of peace would have been shattered.”

The acknowledgement, unusually specific for a process conducted almost entirely out of public view, offered the clearest glimpse yet into how Pakistan pulled off what many had considered an improbable task: brokering a deal to end more than three months of a war that has killed thousands of people, mostly in Iran and Lebanon, and disrupted global energy markets.

Sharif also praised Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar and his team and Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi for their “tireless efforts” while paying tribute to the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and China for their roles in the mediation.

Pakistan’s military and its Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Information and Broadcasting did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for details of the US-Iran agreement.

The agreement, announced early on Monday when Sharif broke the news on X, calls for an immediate and permanent end to military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.