DUBAI, Sept. 11 — Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said its naval forces struck a U.S. unmanned surface vessel at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, the latest escalation around the waterway at the centre of the war between Iran, the United States and Israel.
In a statement broadcast on Iranian state television, the Guards’ navy said it had hit a drone-type unmanned vessel and thwarted what it called an aggressive mission. The claim could not be independently verified, and there was no immediate comment from the U.S. military.
UKMTO Issues Alert as Commercial Traffic Plummets Separately, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) centre said it had received a report that four unknown projectiles hit two vessels off the coast of Khasab, Oman, causing a fire on one of the ships. The centre did not identify the vessels or say who was responsible.
The incidents came amid sharply reduced commercial traffic through the strait. Preliminary ship-tracking data showed only seven vessel transits on Thursday, down from 11 the previous day and well below the 10-day average of 15, underscoring the near-paralysis of the critical energy chokepoint.
A Cycle of Maritime Retaliation The confrontation at sea is the latest in a rapid cycle of kinetic exchanges. On September 5, U.S. forces struck and destroyed three Iranian oil tankers following attempted missile attacks on a U.S. carrier. The escalation intensified on September 8, when CENTCOM announced it had destroyed five additional Iranian crude carriers in the Gulf of Oman and near Kharg Island, a devastating blow to Tehran’s export fleet that directly triggered the subsequent Iranian ballistic missile barrage on U.S. bases in Jordan.
Diplomatic Push in Salalah Amid the escalating maritime insecurity, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) foreign ministers plan to meet Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in the Omani coastal city of Salalah on Monday to discuss a temporary arrangement for managing shipping through the strait, according to people briefed on the matter. The rare diplomatic engagement, heavily backed by Muscat, represents a desperate regional effort to prevent a total collapse of commercial navigation in the Gulf.