Dar says Pakistan will keep pushing to turn Iran-US ceasefire into permanent deal

# Dar says Pakistan will keep pushing to turn Iran-US ceasefire into permanent deal

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, said on May 6, 2026 that Islamabad’s current diplomatic priority was to make the ceasefire between Iran and the United States permanent.

Speaking at the second session of the Ulema Council Conference in Islamabad, Dar said Pakistan had helped bring the two sides into direct talks and had worked to secure the truce. He described the ceasefire as something that had been extended repeatedly, and said its continuation had helped stop heavy daily casualties.

The comments show how Pakistan has moved from backing away from the war to trying to shape what comes after it. According to the Pakistan Today report, Dar urged the audience to pray for Pakistan’s diplomatic efforts and said the next objective was to convert the current pause in fighting into what he called a permanent end to the war.

Dar also framed the issue as broader than the bilateral relationship between Washington and Tehran. He urged Muslim countries to close ranks when they are divided, arguing that collective action would be stronger than isolated efforts. That line is important because it places Pakistan’s diplomacy within a larger appeal for regional unity rather than simple crisis management.

The report says Pakistan had played an active role from February 28 onward in responding to the conflict. Dar said Islamabad had helped bring Washington and Tehran into direct talks for the first time in 47 years. That claim is central to the story: Pakistan is not merely commenting on the war, but presenting itself as a facilitator of a direct channel that had been missing for decades.

The article also notes that the Islamabad talks were the highest-level engagement between the two sides since 1979. Even though those talks ended without a formal agreement, they did not collapse. That ambiguity is what makes Dar’s message significant. Pakistan is betting that a tenuous diplomatic process can still be turned into a structured settlement.

The wider conflict described in the report was severe. The ceasefire had stopped what Dar called a heavy daily loss of life, while the Strait of Hormuz remained closed and Iranian ports remained under blockade. Those details indicate that the war had already imposed strategic and economic consequences well beyond the battlefield.

Trump’s later decision to extend the two-week ceasefire indefinitely, as described in the report, suggests that the diplomacy Dar was defending had some momentum. But there was no final settlement yet, and that is why Pakistan’s role mattered. It was trying to keep the channel open long enough for a political deal to emerge.

On May 6, Dar’s message was both practical and aspirational. Pakistan had helped create a ceasefire. Now it wanted to turn that pause into something durable. Whether the war parties would agree remained uncertain, but Islamabad was clearly not ready to step away from the file.