Shafaq News- Doha
The release of roughly $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets has become the central unresolved issue in ongoing US-Iran negotiations, Iranian media reported on Tuesday, as Qatar intensifies mediation efforts to finalize a broader understanding between Washington and Tehran.
Iran’s Tasnim and Fars News Agencies, citing sources close to the Iranian negotiating team, said that indirect talks with the United States had advanced during the visit of Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf to Doha to help coordinate discussions over mechanisms for releasing the funds.
According to the reports, most major disagreements between Washington and Tehran have already been addressed, with negotiations now focused on the conditions, guarantees, and timetable for unfreezing Iranian funds held abroad, estimated at between $100 billion and $120 billion, largely consisting of oil revenues restricted under international sanctions.
The largest share is believed to be held in China, with roughly $20 billion, alongside around $7 billion in India and approximately $6 billion in Iraq tied to electricity and gas payments. Another $6 billion was previously transferred from South Korea to Qatar under earlier arrangements, while additional assets remain held in Japan, Luxembourg, and the United States.
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The dispute over Iran's frozen assets dates to November 1979, when Washington froze Iranian state holdings in response to the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran. The crisis ended in 1981 with the Algiers Accords, under which the US released a portion of the frozen funds and established the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal to arbitrate outstanding financial disputes —but the broader sanctions remained, and subsequent US administrations continued to freeze Iranian assets tied to terrorism-related court judgments. The most significant modern accumulation occurred after 2018, when President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and reimposed maximum-pressure sanctions, causing Iranian oil revenues held in South Korean banks to be blocked indefinitely.
In September 2023, a Qatar-mediated prisoner swap saw nearly $6 billion transferred from South Korea to restricted accounts in Doha, available only for humanitarian purchases under US Treasury oversight, but the funds were frozen again weeks later following Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel. A parallel legal track yielded a split outcome at the International Court of Justice in March 2023: the court declined jurisdiction over $1.75 billion in Iranian central bank assets frozen in the United States, but ruled separately that Washington had illegally seized assets belonging to other Iranian entities and ordered compensation.