The U.S. launched fresh strikes against Iran on Thursday, the fifth straight day of attacks as shipping traffic slumped in the critical Strait of Hormuz.
The attacks began at 2 p.m. ET, according to U.S. Central Command, with U.S. forces aiming to “further degrade Iranian military capabilities.”
Iran responded to earlier strikes by firing at American bases in Kuwait and Jordan, with the Kuwaiti Armed Forces warning of explosions as a result of air-defense systems intercepting hostile targets.
Tehran seems in no mood to back down in the face of Donald Trump’s warning that he’ll escalate strikes — with the U.S. president citing Iranian power plants and bridges as potential targets — until the Islamic Republic reopens the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for energy supplies that’s now the focal point of the war.
If the US does target Iranian infrastructure, “everything that has remained intact so far due to Iran’s nobility will be smashed to pieces – that is, all the infrastructure in the region,” state-run Islamic Republic News Agency cited a spokesman for the country’s central military command as saying on Thursday.
Iran has asked its Houthi allies in Yemen to close the Red Sea oil route if the U.S. strikes Iran’s power network, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
“As long as the United States does not accept the Iranian legal system, this strait will remain closed,” a spokesman for Iran’s army said, according to a report from the semi-official Iranian Students’ News Agency. That was likely a reference to Tehran’s demand that ships seek its permission before sailing through Hormuz and abide by its rules, including the imposition of any service fees.
Observable commercial traffic through the strait was sparse, with transits largely limited to Iran-linked vessels using the northern route approved by Tehran, ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg show. Even so, evidence continues to indicate that some oil cargoes are crossing without broadcasting their location.
Two supertankers carrying Saudi and Iraqi crude reappeared off Oman late Wednesday after going dark on tracking systems in the Persian Gulf over the weekend, indicating they likely completed the Hormuz passage earlier this week. Some Iranian tankers also changed their course after the U.S. resumed blockading its ships again this week.
The slowdown has pushed the seven-day moving average of crude oil flows, including Iranian supplies, through Wednesday down to about 5.5 million barrels a day, from around 9.4 million barrels a day the previous week, according to Bloomberg calculations based on vessel-tracking data and information from Kpler and Vortexa data.