Iran: commercial shipping routes in Red Sea unsafe
Iran has warned that commercial shipping routes in the Red Sea are unsafe and that three of its tankers have been attacked off the coast of Saudi Arabia in the past six months, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Islamic Republic has only publicly announced one attack on an Iranian tanker in the Red Sea, when it claimed that the Sabiti tanker was hit by two missiles.
Iranian MP Abolfazl Hassanbeigi blamed Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia for the attack on the Sabiti. None of those countries admitted to the attack, but there were indications from some officials that some combination of the countries played a role in the response to Iranian attacks on US-allies tankers.
“We believe that this is an attack organized by one or more states,
since two other Iranian flagged [very large] tankers were similarly attacked in the same approximate area,” with “similar damages to the ships,” Iran wrote in a letter about the attacks to the International Maritime Organization.
“A major concern in this respect is that the organized and directed pattern of these attacks within a short time and similar locations have rendered
the Red Sea as an unsafe route for ships to adopt for their voyages,” the letter said.
The other two Iranian tankers attacked were the Happiness 1 in April and the Helm in August, according to the letter. The first attack occurred before the US ended waivers from sanctions against Iran in May, as well as before multiple Saudi and Emirati tankers were targeted by acts of sabotage largely blamed on Iran, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Since the first attack occurred prior to May, the narrative is less clear about how or why the US would have been involved, though it is possible that other complexities could have led to the attack by the countries aligned against Iran, or that there was some other cause, such as piracy or even a technical malfunction which Tehran is hiding.
It is unclear why Iran was choosing to reveal the other attacks now, after having kept them quiet.
Possibilities could include that Iran has already been embarrassed by the public attack on one of its tankers so there was no longer a reason to try to keep the other incidents quiet, or that it is an attempt to rally moral support for its cause by claiming that its attacks on other countries’ tankers were more of a response than a newly-initiated round of conflict.