A ‘secret’ Omani shipping route has opened up in the Strait of Hormuz, over which Washington appears to have more control than Tehran

For 175 days, the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed to commercial shipping; as of 18 August, according to Kpler, the company that monitors energy trade, 3,456 ships had passed through the strait, representing around 20 per cent of the traffic prior to the start of the war between the United States and Iran. As the 60-day ceasefire deadline approached – during which no agreement was reached between Washington and Tehran – shipping through the Strait had not only failed to resume, but it had slowed down following attacks by the Iranian regime on several oil tankers that had travelled via the Omani route – a passage which, according to Muscat, is guaranteed by international law and over which the Iranians seek full control, whilst conducting exclusive negotiations with Oman. Trump threatened Oman, saying he was ready to bomb it if it were to sign an agreement on Hormuz with Tehran; he then wrote on his social media platform ‘Truth’ that he had ‘complete control’ of the waterway, which was open and operational: ‘All underwater mines have been removed or detonated’. On Wednesday, he said that “many ships” from Gulf countries allied with the United States were continuing to pass through thanks to the help of the US military. This is not the first time Trump has boasted about the Strait being opened, only for maritime monitoring companies to refute his claims: back in June, he had already spoken of a plan of which Iran was allegedly unaware, in which dozens of oil tankers had been escorted out of the Strait at night, with their transponders switched off: on Truth, he had written that two hundred ships had set sail along this unknown route, closer to Oman than to Iran, enabling the passage of two hundred ships carrying over one hundred million barrels of oil. This theory has not been entirely refuted by satellite and port analyses, which have repeatedly confirmed how difficult it is to obtain a complete picture of traffic in the strait if oil tankers switch off their transponders to avoid detection by Iran.

Axios journalist Barak Ravid has now pieced together, thanks to two American sources, how the US military is reportedly managing the ‘secret operation’ that Trump had spoken of, and which was apparently made possible by a two-week military campaign by US Central Command, which compromised Iran’s radar and maritime surveillance systems.  Here’s how it works: a task force based at the army headquarters at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, coordinates with Gulf allies, drawing up a daily list of ships leaving the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz and heading towards the Arabian Sea, and another list of the empty chartered oil tankers travelling from the Arabian Sea, through the strait, to ports in the Gulf states to load more oil. Every night, around 15–20 oil tankers travel at different times in two convoys – one entering and one leaving – along the southern corridor running alongside Oman, with their transponders switched off and escorted by the US military: the Iranians, whose visibility in the Strait has been reduced and who are therefore ‘blind’, would consequently fire at random, ‘in the general direction in which the ships might be passing’, writes Ravid. The two US officials said that Washington has been controlling the southern corridor of the Strait of Hormuz in this way for the past two months and that average daily exports are rising and approaching ten million barrels.

Although the outlook is optimistic – shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains below pre-war levels and only a small number of companies have shown a willingness to use the Omani route – it appears that Iran has lost control of a section of the corridor, as over 80 per cent of transits in the last two weeks are reported to have followed the Omani route, and even the ‘secret’ operation revealed by Axios refers to the southern channel, along the coast of Oman. David Goldman wrote on CNN that at present “the evidence is unequivocal”: the United States, albeit using considerable resources to facilitate the transit of a limited quantity of oil through the Strait, is gaining ground with its Navy, whilst “it seems increasingly likely that Iran has lost, at least partially, its control”, agrees a Kpler executive, Homayoun Falakshahi. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are reported to have chartered the largest oil tankers in recent weeks to cross the Strait and then transfer the oil to their clients’ tankers outside the route threatened by Iran, in the Gulf of Oman.