NEW YORK: Iran’s Foreign Minister Javed Zarif has said the US has been hesitant and non-serious in its approach to combating extremist groups in Iraq and Syria and that President Obama needs a reality check on the subject of defeating the Islamic State insurgency.

In an interview on National Public Radio on Thursday, Mr Zarif said the United States was “not serious” about defeating the extremist group.

He later spoke at the Council on Foreign relations and made similar remarks.

US interests, he said, were “not served by a double-edged policy” in which militants of the so-called Islamic State were dealt with indifferently depending on whether they were inside Syria or in neighbouring Iraq, he said.

“You cannot deal with a terrorist group whose bases are in Syria based on this illusion ... that you can [also] have this pressure on the Syrian government,” Zarif told NPR.

Asked if he thought Obama ought to reach an accommodation with Syrian President Bashar Assad, he replied: “President Obama needs to reach an accommodation with reality.”

On the subject of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, Mr Zarif said all the “wrong options” had already been tried and that “we are ready” for an agreement.

“The only problem is how this could be presented to some domestic constituencies, primarily in the United States but also in places in Europe,” because “some are not interested in any deal,” he said.

Published in Dawn, September 19th, 2014