There are two more tankers on fire in the Persian Gulf, and it’s starting to look like the Persian Gulf has a small tanker war in the making. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Iran blew up two ships on Thursday, four last month, and claims the U.S. has the evidence to prove it—although he hasn’t shown us any proof yet. So who would want to target Norwegian and Japanese tankers? How would Iran carry out a covert tanker sabotage operation? And are Iran’s alleged attacks on its neighbors going to end up sucking the U.S. into another conflict?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Maximum pressure: The answer to why Iran might have targeted tankers from Japan and Norway—two countries it’s hardly at war with—might be found in their cargo. In May, the Trump administration announced a new wave of sanctions that targeted Iran’s petrochemical industry. During a visit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called out those sanctions in particular, which makes the two ships targeted in Thursday’s explosion all the more interesting.
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“The two tankers today were not carrying oil. One was carrying naptha, one was carrying methanol, which are both petrochemical feedstocks of the type recently sanctioned,” David Desroches, a former Pentagon official who worked on Gulf security issues, told The Daily Beast. “Perhaps a message is being sent.”
As the The Daily Beast previously reported, U.S. intelligence believes that Iran’s recent mischief-making appears to be the result of an internal decision to push back on the Trump administration’s so-called maximum-pressure campaign. If Iran was behind the recent sets of tanker attacks, the messages would be pretty clear: If we can’t export our oil and petrochemical products, neither will you—and that goes for countries outside the Gulf, too.
Weapons: CNN reported that the weapons used to attack the tankers on Thursday were limpet mines—small magnetic mines that divers could attach to the metal hull of a ship to destroy or disable it. The news, if true, is interesting in light of the fact that Emirati, Saudi, and Norwegian officials say limpet mines were the weapon of choice in an attack on the four tankers hit off the Emirati port of Fujairah in May. In that case, officials from those three countries said in a statement that the mines were placed in such a way that they would “incapacitate the ships without sinking them or detonating their cargoes”—a careful calibration that the attackers in Thursday’s tanker attacks appear to have abandoned. Imagery of one of the damaged tankers shows a gaping hole in the starboard side of its hull near where the ship’s cargo would sit.
Timing: The apparent attack struck a Japanese tanker right as Abe was on the tail end of a historic visit to Tehran, the first visit of a Japanese leader since the revolution. The U.S. has historically used the Japanese and Swiss governments to relay messages to Iran in the absence of formal diplomatic relations, and Abe had hoped to help turn the temperature down on U.S.-Iran relations and press Trump’s offer of talks. If you believe the U.S. attribution of the attack to Iran, that’s a pretty aggressive way of saying “thanks but no thanks.”
Even aside from the tanker incident, Abe’s diplomacy didn’t work out so well. Khamenei tweeted his thanks to Abe, but said “I don’t consider Trump as a person deserving to exchange messages with; I have no response for him & will not answer him.” Khamenei cited Trump’s decision to sanction Iran’s petrochemical industry and withdraw from the nuclear agreement.
Targeting: The choice of vessels in both the May attacks and Thursday’s incident in the Gulf of Oman is interesting in light of the U.S. attribution of both incidents to Iran. The waters in the Gulf offer a potential attacker an array of different tanker flags to hit, but the May attackers chose two Saudi-flagged tankers, one Emirati tanker, and one Norwegian vessel in what authorities from those three countries characterized as “pre-selected” targets. Another Norwegian tanker was also hit as part of Thursday’s attacks.
Given the historic tensions between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, it would make sense that Iran would want to lash out at its rivals. But Norway and Japan aren’t exactly known for tense relationships in the Middle East. Quite the opposite. So why choose their tankers?
Attribution evidence is still in short supply, to say nothing of targeting rationale, so it’s too early to say. But Iran has leaned heavily on Europe to break with the Trump administration’s maximum-pressure policy. Iran’s foreign minister, Javid Zarif, recently told the European Iran-deal partners that they “should normalize economic ties with Iran” or else Tehran would “halt our commitments or will take action in accordance with their measures.”
Suspects: If Iran was behind the two sets of tanker attacks as the U.S. argues, it would’ve likely been carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy Special Forces, otherwise known as Sepah Navy Special Forces (SNSF). The IRGC Navy has responsibility for Iran’s first naval district, which encompasses the areas around the Strait of Hormuz, with the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy in charge of the second district around Bandar-e-Jask.
The covert installation of limpet mines by divers on the tankers, as described by U.S. and Emirati officials, would fall well within the portfolio of naval special-operations forces that make up the SNSF. You can see them practicing assaults on tankers at sea in a 2014 Iranian TV segment where the late commander Brig. Gen Mohammad Nazeri narrated a mock assault by his commandos on an empty tanker, the Morning Glory.
Still, not much is known about SNSF operations. At least one SNSF commando, Amir Siavoshi, was killed fighting in Aleppo, Syria, in 2016 as part of Iran’s efforts to defend the Assad regime. SNSF commandos also participated in counterpiracy operations against Somali pirates.
Nowhere else to go: So where are the U.S. and Iran heading? At the moment, it doesn’t appear to be anywhere good. After the Trump administration rushed an aircraft carrier and bombers to the region in May, Trump appeared to offer an olive branch to Tehran and publicly asked for talks. Now that the supreme leader, who has the final say on foreign policy, has ruled out high-level diplomacy with the U.S., that doesn’t leave much room for either party to maneuver.
Iran appears to be looking for ways to push back on the sanctions designation and annoy the U.S. without prompting a direct military clash. Thus far, attacks on the Trump administration’s close allies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates appear to be the place where Iran can lash out without bringing the full wrath of U.S. Central Command down on its head. That may explain why we’ve seen Iranian-backed militants in Yemen launch more Iranian explosive-armed drones at targets in Saudi Arabia in the past month than in the entire history of the Yemen conflict. It also might explain why Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen recently launched a land attack cruise missile on a Saudi airport this week—another first for the conflict.
The question is whether the tension between Iran and its Gulf neighbors can keep rising without pulling the United States into it. U.S. officials say they haven’t ruled out military action—a pro forma response that doesn’t say much. But Bloomberg reports that the Defense Department is considering the possibility of American military escorts for tankers in the Gulf—a move that could put the U.S. in the middle of the brewing tanker war.
With additional reporting by Erin Banco.
