IRGC says it hit the Togo-flagged tanker Trend in the Strait of Hormuz

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy said on 18 September that it had struck the Togo-flagged product tanker Trend as the ship tried to pass the Strait of Hormuz. Rear Admiral Ali Ozmaei, the IRGC Navy commander, said the 7,119 deadweight-tonne vessel was hit, caught fire and was forced to stop. He called the transit “illegal” and said the ship had been “encouraged” by the US military.

The claim has not been independently verified in full. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations centre reported a security incident in the strait, 16 nautical miles northeast of Khasab, Oman. UKMTO did not name the Trend. IRNA carried Ozmaei’s statement. Shipping trade outlets treated the two reports as likely the same event.

The count this incident joins

The International Maritime Organization told members this week that it had confirmed 80 attacks on merchant vessels in and around the Strait of Hormuz since the Iran war began on 28 February. That is almost three a week. At least 22 seafarers have been killed. The IMO cautioned that not every projectile can be attributed to Iran. US forces have also struck Iranian vessels, and some origins remain unclear. The Trend incident, if confirmed, would sit outside that 80, which ran through 15 September.

Iran has, since the opening weeks of the war, tried to impose its own transit rules on the strait. Commercial ships are told to use designated routes and to coordinate with the IRGC Navy. Ozmaei repeated on Friday that unauthorised passage “will have no outcome other than the destruction of the offending vessel.” Thomas Kazakos, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Shipping, told the UN Security Council on Thursday that straits cannot become places where ships must obtain permission to pass.

Those two sentences cannot both be true in practice. About a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil has historically moved through Hormuz. Volumes have already dropped. War-risk insurance has risen. Some owners have simply stopped the transit. A 7,119 dwt product tanker is a small ship in that traffic. Hitting it is a signal more than a supply shock. The signal is that the IRGC still treats the strait as a checkpoint it can close ship by ship.

What to watch next

Confirmation will come from the flag state, the owner, or photographs of a fire on a Togo-flagged hull near Khasab. Togo’s registry is widely used by smaller tankers. If the Trend was carrying refined product rather than crude, the cargo story is local. The legal story is not. UNCLOS treats transit passage through international straits as a right. Iran’s wartime instructions treat it as a licence. Every new strike is a data point in that argument.

Italy said this week it is preparing national escorts for Italian-linked ships through Bab el-Mandeb after Houthi gains in southern Yemen. That is a different strait and a different navy. It shows the same instinct: if the multinational missions are slow, capitals will try to push their own hulls through with their own guns. Hormuz is already past that stage. The IRGC is shooting. The United States is shooting back elsewhere in the same war. Merchant crews are the people in the middle, on ships that still have to move fuel if the lights are to stay on in Asia.