Marco Rubio arrives in Samarkand for C5+1 summit

US Senator Marco Rubio arrived in Uzbekistan on Sunday evening to meet with leaders of the C5+1 group, which is engaged in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

The group includes the United States and the Muslim-majority countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

US officials said resource-rich Central Asia, located between China, Russia, and Iran, deserves more attention than it received from former President Donald Trump's administration.

Trump hosted C5 leaders at the White House in November last year, when Kazakhstan agreed to join the Abraham Accords, a series of agreements under which Muslim-majority countries normalized or strengthened ties with Israel.