Both ships were still burning when a boat from the Iraqi Ports Company reached them. “A boat from the Iraqi Ports Company rescued 25 crew members from the two vessels, and the fire is still burning on both ships,” said Farhan al-Fartousi, head of Iraq’s state ports company, after the attack on Wednesday, March 11.
One crew member died. “We pulled the body of one foreign crew member from the water,” an Iraqi official said. Rescuers kept looking for others.
Rescue counts differed from one Iraqi account to the next. Port authorities said 31 others were pulled out alive. Al-Fartousi later told state television that 38 had been rescued. He did not give the nationalities of the missing or say who was behind the attack.
Drone boats suspected
The tankers were the Safesea Vishnu, flagged in the Marshall Islands, and the Zefyros, flagged in Malta. Both carried fuel from Iraq. An official of the Iraqi Maritime Authority told Rudaw that they were “bombed and caught fire near the port of Faw.” The ships had been stuck at the port since the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began nearly two weeks earlier.
Preliminary investigations pointed to suicide boats, but the source of the attack was unknown, the official said. Ynet reported that Iraqi officials believed explosives-laden drone boats operated by Iran struck the ships. Iraq’s government media cell said only that the tankers were “subjected to sabotage.”
Iraq’s state oil marketing organization, SOMO, said the Safesea Vishnu had been chartered by an Iraqi company and the Zefyros carried a shipment from the Basra Gas Company. They were hit in Iraqi territorial waters, in an area where tankers usually take on cargo transferred from other ships. The UK Maritime Trade Operations agency said the crew of one tanker was evacuated safely. After the strikes, Iraq’s oil ports stopped operating entirely, while commercial ports stayed open.
Six vessels in a few days
Ynet counted six vessels targeted by Iran in the Gulf in recent days. Three cargo ships were hit by gunfire near the Strait of Hormuz, and a container ship near Jebel Ali, the largest port in the United Arab Emirates, caught fire after being struck by an unidentified object. At least 16 ships have been damaged since the war started.
Traffic through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply, has nearly stopped since the United States and Israel began strikes on Iran on Feb. 28. Oil prices touched levels unseen since 2022. They dipped briefly after Donald Trump called the war “pretty much completed,” then rose above $100 per barrel on Thursday.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that if attacks on Iran go on, it will not let “a single liter of oil” move from the Middle East to the United States, Israel or their allies. Trump said oil companies should keep using the Strait of Hormuz because “almost the entire Iranian fleet is gone.”
Sources
- Crew member killed in attack on oil tankers off Iraq
- Iranian drone boats attack oil tankers near Iraq as Gulf shipping disruptions grow | Watch
