France warns against mixing ISIS fight with Iran nuclear talks

                  

The nuclear talks with the Iranian regime should not be mixed with fighting against the ISIS, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"You must not establish confusion between this question and the question of nuclear weapons that we are discussing now with the Iranians," Mr. Fabius said at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Iranians did not ask us to have a mélange between the two. But anyway, we have said—and I have said—that these were different questions," he said.

Mr. Fabius said that Iran needs to reach a nuclear deal with the six powers that demonstrates clearly to the world that it is not seeking nuclear weapons.

"Either you are able to have the bomb or you are not able to have the bomb. And it's a question on which I have always said to the Iranians we cannot have a confusion between the different subjects," he said.

Reuters reported on Sunday that the Iranian regime has made the regime's cooperation against ISIS contingent upon the West's flexibility on the nuclear issue.

"Iran can help in the fight against the ISIL terrorists ... but it is a two-way street. You give something, you take something," a senior Iranian regime official told Reuters on September 21.

By taking part in the campaign against ISIS, the Iranian regime wants to compensate for the loss of its in Iraq, and to expand its influence in the region and save its nuclear weapons program.

Meanwhile, the United States announced on Monday that it refuses to link talks over Iran's nuclear program with efforts to form an international alliance to fight ISIS.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, during a press briefing on Monday: "The United States will not be in the position of trading aspects of Iran's nuclear program to secure commitments to take on the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant [ISIS]."