Ship-tracking services said on Wednesday that at least four tankers carrying oil and liquid natural gas (LNG) abandoned their efforts to pass through the Strait of Hormuz after Iran attacked three ships on Tuesday.
Iran attacked three vessels with drones and missiles on Tuesday, most severely damaging the Qatari LNG tanker Al-Rekayyat. The tanker developed a fire in its engine room, which posed a severe threat but has reportedly been brought under control; the ship is now stranded off the coast of Oman.
Another ship struck by Iran, a Saudi-flagged oil tanker called Wedyan, suffered significant damage but remained seaworthy. No casualties were reported from any of the strikes.
The attacks followed belligerent radio messages from Iran’s terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) ordering all ships to follow a route under its control along the Iranian coast, and threatening violence against ships that took the American-recommended course along the coast of Oman.
Ship tracking firms Kpler and LSEG said three LNG tankers called Al Ghariya, Duhail, and Al Ruwais were moving slowly toward the Strait of Hormuz before the Iranian attacks, but turned around on Tuesday evening.
All three ships are managed by QatarEnergy, the state-owned national energy company of Qatar. All are currently empty and were apparently hoping to load cargoes at Qatar’s LNG export terminal, located in the industrial hub and port city of Ras Laffan.
The fourth ship that turned away from the Strait of Hormuz was an Indian-flagged Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC), or supertanker, called Lila Vadinar. Unlike the Qatari LNG transports, this ship was fully loaded with two million barrels of crude oil from Kuwait.
Over a dozen LNG tankers are currently anchored near Ras Laffan, presumably awaiting word of safe conditions to load cargoes and sail through the Strait of Hormuz. Dozens more ships are holding at positions on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz.
Before Iran attacked on Tuesday, some traffic was moving through the strait, although it was a fraction of the normal daily traffic through the vital waterway.
Peak traffic since the Strait of Hormuz was nominally reopened by the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran was about 40 ships in a day, while the prewar average was 125. Even before Iran’s terrorist attacks, traffic had declined to 16 ships in a day.
On Tuesday the Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) raised its threat level for transiting the Strait of Hormuz from “substantial” to “severe.”
“The recent confirmed incidents highlight that the threat environment remains heightened and warrants extreme vigilance,” JMIC said in an advisory to mariners.
U.K. Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) also noted the Iranian attacks and issued appropriate warnings to commercial vessels.
Speaking from the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday, President Donald Trump suggested the U.S. blockade of Iran could resume, along with more punitive airstrikes, and possibly even a more dramatic action like destroying or seizing Iran’s primary oil export terminal on Kharg Island.
Firstpost on Wednesday quoted security analysts who said control of the Strait of Hormuz has become more important to the regime in Tehran than even nuclear weapons – a “golden weapon,” as Iranian officials describe it, that can both provide blackmail leverage against the United States and a bountiful source of income from fees and ransoms to Iran.
Iranian sources said it would be “impossible” for the United States to wrest control of the strait away from Tehran, which now views any return to the prewar status quo of free passage as an unacceptable “surrender” to American hegemony.
Iranian leaders are so confident of this view that they carelessly violated the MOU to attack ships on Tuesday, seeking to force the world to accept that Iran has total control over the exit from the Persian Gulf, and that submitting to its demands is the only way to get shipping traffic back to normal.
Read the full article here