Strait of Hormuz clear of Iran navy ships, US commander says
US strikes have been finishing of Iran's naval fleet, senior officials said, but its threats to the Strait of Hormuz have not yet been eliminated.
WASHINGTON — Just a day after a senior official of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that any ships entering the Strait of Hormuz would be subject to attack, a top US military commander declared the vital economic sea lane and its surrounding waterways clear of Iranian naval vessels.
“Today, there is not a single Iranian ship underway in the Arabian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz or Gulf of Oman," US Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, the top American commander in the Middle East, said in a video address released late on Tuesday.
The US military had sunk 17 Iranian naval ships, including the Iranian navy's main submarine, by the end of the campaign's fourth day on Tuesday, Cooper said in the announcement.
Iran's ballistic missile attacks slowed somewhat on Tuesday but drones continued to be fired across the Gulf, military officials said.
"Iran’s ability to hit us is declining, while our combat power is building,” US Navy Adm. Brad Cooper said. “My operational assessment is that we are ahead of our game plan.”
Yet the IRGC’s threats to shipping in the strait have not fully abated.
Maritime traffic around the Strait of Hormuz ground to a halt yesterday after Ebrahim Jabari, an adviser to the IRGC top commander, declared the waterway closed and threatened that any ship that crosses it “will be set ablaze.”
Iran still possesses armed drones and may still be able to fire anti-ship missiles, which were proven lethally effective by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in their attacks on commercial shipping in recent years.
Just prior to the release of Cooper’s statement on Tuesday, the UK Maritime Trade Operations monitoring agency said the crew of a vessel seven miles east of the Emirati port of Fujairah reported that it had been struck by an unknown projectile, causing minor damage. Three hours earlier, in a separate incident, the crew of another ship 137 nautical miles east of Muscat reported an explosion and smoke, but no injured mariners.
The IRGC navy’s notorious fast boats have the capability to litter the Hormuz Strait with sea mines, posing a lethal threat to private shipping, current and former officials say. The small boats — of which the IRGC was believed to have upwards of 3,000 at the start of the war — are harder for US reconnaissance aircraft to detect across the vast waterways, and submerged mines could take US Navy littoral combat ships weeks or longer to clean up.
More than 3,000 commercial ships were held up west of the strait in the Gulf on Tuesday, according to Clarksons Research, a maritime data tracking firm.
Later that day, President Donald Trump said in a social media post that he had ordered the US Development Finance Corporation to offer risk insurance for commercial trade transiting the Gulf, with a particular focus on energy shipments.
In the announcement on his Truth Social platform, Trump added that he may order the US Navy to escort ships through the strait if deemed necessary.
The US' Fifth Fleet has not yet been ordered to do so, a person familiar with the matter said.
