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

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy said on Friday that it hit the Togo-flagged product tanker Trend after the ship tried to pass the Strait of Hormuz outside Tehran’s approved route. Rear Admiral Ali Ozmaei, the force commander, said the vessel was struck, caught fire and was then halted.

The IRGC statement, carried by IRNA and Tasnim, named the ship and accused the United States of encouraging the transit. Ozmaei said any unauthorised crossing would end in the destruction of the offending vessel. He added that the force still held the waterway after what he called 200 consecutive nights of control.

Independent confirmation of the ship’s condition has not been published. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations office reported a security incident late Thursday about 16 nautical miles northeast of Khasab, on Oman’s Musandam peninsula. UKMTO did not name the vessel and did not say whether the report referred to Trend.

Shipping databases list Trend as a product tanker of about 7,119 deadweight tonnes. That is a small ship by Gulf standards. The size matters because most of the traffic Iran has targeted since late February has been larger crude and product carriers trying to move oil that once went through Hormuz without paying a toll or accepting an Iranian routing plan.

Tehran has treated the strait as a controlled passage since the United States and Israel struck Iranian targets at the end of February. Iran wants ships to use a route it approves and, in some cases, to pay for transit. The International Chamber of Shipping rejects that claim. Secretary-general Thomas Kazakos told the UN Security Council on Thursday that straits cannot become places where commercial ships must obtain permission or accept arbitrary limits because politics have shifted.

The International Maritime Organization said this week it had verified 80 attacks on merchant vessels in and around Hormuz since 28 February, an average of almost three a week. At least 22 seafarers have been killed. The IMO count ran to 15 September, so a confirmed strike on Trend would be an additional case. The agency also cautioned that not every projectile in the Gulf can be assigned to Iran. US forces have struck Iranian craft, and the origin of some weapons remains unclear.

Hormuz is a chokepoint about 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest. Before the war it carried roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil. After months of attacks, inventories of refined products have tightened. McKinsey’s Global Institute has described jet fuel and gasoline stocks as sitting near five-year lows, with refining capacity now as much of a constraint as crude itself.

Italy is preparing a separate escort plan for nationally linked merchant ships in the Red Sea after Houthi advances in southern Yemen. Defence minister Guido Crosetto said Rome would not wait for the European Union’s Aspides mission before protecting Italian hulls through Bab el-Mandeb. That decision sits beside the Hormuz problem rather than solving it. The two chokepoints now constrain different legs of the same energy system: crude leaving the Gulf, and products and tankers moving between Asia, Europe and the Red Sea.

Ozmaei’s language treats US naval activity as the cause of the Trend transit. Washington has not confirmed any link to that ship. CENTCOM has published its own record of vessels disabled for blockade violations in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Gulf through the spring and summer. Those notices name different hulls.

For crews still working the Gulf, the practical question is whether a fire on a small Togo-flagged tanker changes routing advice. Insurers already price Hormuz as a war zone. Flag states of convenience, including Togo, remain common on older product tankers that try the passage when larger owners stay out. If UKMTO later ties Thursday’s Khasab report to Trend, the 81st logged attack will have a name, a tonnage and a position. Until then, the IRGC claim stands as the only detailed account of what happened on the water overnight.

The next test is whether other small product tankers keep trying the same corridor. Ozmaei said they should not. The ICS position at the Security Council was that coastal states do not get to rewrite passage rules because a war is underway. Those two statements now sit on the same stretch of water.