RFERL:

More than 100 Iranians activists and well-known personalities have issued a statement calling for direct talks between Iran and the United States.

Referring to the positive global response to President Donald Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un of North Korea, as well as the precarious situation in the Middle East, the signatories to the statement have called for direct talks between Tehran and Washington without setting any pre-conditions.

The signatories include Gholamhossein Karbaschi (former governor of Isfahan Province and Tehran mayor), Abolfazl Bazargan (son of the first prime minister of the Islamic Republic), Ahmad Montazeri (a mid-ranking cleric and the son of late Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the dismissed heir apparent of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Rohullah Khomeini), Jalal Jalalizadeh (a Kurdish former member of the parliament), former Tehran City Councilor Sadiqeh Vasmaqi, former reformist MP Jamileh Kadivar and former members of the Fedayeen Khalq Marxist group Ali Keshtgar and Behrouz Khaleeq.

A sizable number of those on the list are current or former regime insiders, some with links to those who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, an event that led to the severing of ties between Tehran and Washington, and a few leftists whose ideology is marked with opposition to the United States.

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