Who can grant what?
Speaking as commander of the Committee for the Search for Missing Persons of Iran's Armed Forces General Staff, Mohammad Baqerzadeh made two separate requests on Saturday. He asked Qatar to move the pilots from the place on water where they are held to a hospital on land, saying they were in poor physical condition. He asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to send an air ambulance to Qatar to speed the return of the injured and the sick to Iran.[1]
Qatar's account does not match that description. Doha denied last week that it was holding Iranian pilots, saying they had crossed Qatari airspace without permission earlier this year and had not answered attempts to contact them. The same statement said Qatar had contacted Iran to coordinate the handover of the remains of one pilot and had invited Tehran to review the details of its search and rescue operations, but had received no response. A Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson said on Tuesday that the invitation remained open.[1]
No body with the power to compel
What these channels share is that each depends on the other side agreeing. Because Qatar does not accept that it is holding anyone, the request for an air ambulance has no counterpart carrying a duty to hand anyone over; what remains is the expert team Doha has agreed to receive and the invitation it says it is keeping open. There is another possible explanation: a channel that has not become public may be working between the two, and the statement may be aimed mainly at an audience inside Iran. Even so, nothing in the known statements binds either side to act within a set period.[1]
This continues what I set out in this column on 17 August: because the Islamabad memorandum tied every binding step to a final deal that was never written, its expiry ended no obligation, and questions such as the strait and the pilots slid to third-party bodies that cannot compel anyone. The first concrete instance of that slide is Baqerzadeh's call on the International Committee of the Red Cross. That body, known in short as the ICRC, holds no decision-making power; what it can offer is a request for access and help with a transfer.[1], [3]
The same pattern in a second file
A second file moved the same way in the same week. After repeated requests from Baghdad, Iran allowed a number of ships carrying Iraqi oil through Hormuz; that permission was one of the requests that stood out during the visit to Iraq by Iran's parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Iraq's president Nizar Amidi described it at the Baghdad Dialogue conference and said the question remained complicated. The permission was tied to no published procedure, and its scope, its duration and the vessels it covers were not set out. Talks between Iran and Oman have produced no text either.[2]
The same gap brings the two files together: the party in possession grants permission whenever it chooses and makes no binding promise about when. The signal to watch is therefore plain. If, by 31 October 2026, either question produces a document with a named administrator and a date — a statement announcing that the ICRC has been given access, or a published procedure for transit — the pattern will have changed. If no such document appears, both questions stay at the discretion of the party that grants the permission.[1], [2]