Hormuz, Centcom declares international lanes cleared of mines and releases blockade figures

On August 28 the commander of the U.S. Central Command, Brad Cooper, announced in a video released by Centcom that the internationally recognized transit routes of the Strait of Hormuz are free of the mines laid by the Pasdaran (Arab News, gCaptain). It is the first announcement of the operation’s completion since the newspaper has been following the matter: we wrote about it on August 27, when the Pasdaran declared the Strait still closed on Tehran’s terms.

“The internationally recognized transit routes in the Strait are free of Iranian naval mines,” Cooper said (transl. from English). According to the commander’s account, the clearance operation employed Navy divers, Navy SEAL raiders and air assets from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines (The Hill).

With the announcement come, for the first time, overall figures on the operation. Cooper put at nearly 1,500 the commercial vessels whose transit was protected by U.S. forces, for about 750 million barrels of crude oil. On the opposite side, he stated that since the imposition of the naval blockade in mid-July, Iran has not exported oil from its ports: 75 ships turned away, three disabled (gCaptain, The Hill). These are figures from the U.S. side, released by the command that conducted the operation: no independent verification of the counts is currently available, and they should be read as a statement from the party that produced them.

That the lanes are clear does not mean the Strait is safe. The British Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) reported on Thursday that a tanker was hit in the Strait by an unidentified projectile, with the resulting fire subsequently extinguished (RTÉ). The International Maritime Organization has recorded 70 incidents in the Strait since the start of the war, with 19 seafarers killed (Domani): the institutional figure measures a pressure on shipping of which the mines were only one part.

On the political front, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaei, stated that Iran is preparing, at the request of the mediators, the list of conditions for reopening the Strait (Al Jazeera). On the same occasion he added: “We do not trust the United States” (transl. from Persian). This is a new formal step compared to the positions reported by the newspaper in recent days — a list of conditions announced as being prepared, not a list already presented — but the content of the demands is not public and the mediators are not named in the available sources.

Two parallel and unreconciled statements therefore remain: Washington describes navigable lanes and a blockade that holds, Tehran maintains the closure as a bargaining chip and refers to a document not yet filed. The verifiable intermediate data point is the IMO’s on incidents, and it will be the first to indicate whether the mine clearance changes the actual risk for those transiting.