How Many Tankers Hit Mines in Hormuz? Iran Claims 12

Iran’s armed forces have now claimed that at least 12 tankers struck naval mines in and around the Strait of Hormuz between October 31 and November 5, with the regular army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issuing separate and partly conflicting accounts. Between them the two forces said five tankers and a tugboat caught fire on November 4 and 5 alone. The army placed its strikes in unsafe waters east of the strait, while the Guards placed theirs on what they call an illegal passage to the south. Not one of the vessels has been named, flagged or located, and no shipping company or maritime authority has reported a loss to a mine. The count is significant less as a record of losses than as a measure of how hard Tehran is pressing the case that the waterway is closed to uncoordinated traffic.

The tally has risen in steps over the past week, each new statement adding to the last without naming a ship. On October 31 the Guards’ navy said a supertanker had hit a mine east of the strait, and on November 1 it said two more tankers had exploded on an unauthorised route after switching off their navigation and identification systems, claiming that both were operating with U.S. military support. On November 4 the Guards stated that four tankers had been destroyed by mines and were still burning, with two other vessels halted, a claim this site examined the same morning. The next day opened with a Guards account of two tankers and a tug ablaze, alongside a claim that two U.S. LUCAS drones had been captured intact. The army then reported one burning tanker east of the strait in the early morning and two more around noon.

What monitoring forces have recorded over the same period is considerably thinner. The UK Maritime Trade Operations centre reported that a tanker was hit by two unidentified projectiles about 50 nautical miles north of Madinat ash Shamal in Qatar at 23:20 GMT on November 4, without naming the ship or its flag, an incident set out in our Qatar report. Qatar Gas Transport Company stated that its liquefied natural gas carrier Al Mayeda was struck by unidentified objects on October 30, with no crew injured. In late October two vessels that Iran described as mine victims were recorded instead as hit by a projectile south of Lavan Island and by charges fixed above the waterline northeast of Khasab.

The gap reflects a reporting problem as much as a military one, with the UK centre having acknowledged last month that it was struggling to count attacks accurately because most ships decline to report them. Iran’s navy has declared the strait unsafe and closed to vessels that do not coordinate their passage with Tehran. American forces, which have blockaded Iranian ports for months, maintain that the strait is open to shipping. On November 5 Omani foreign minister Badr Albusaidi and Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi discussed by telephone what Muscat called joint technical mechanisms to secure the unimpeded flow of trade and energy through the strait, though no agreement was announced.