Seven strikes in a week: tankers burn as Hormuz oil exports defy pre-war levels

The Strait of Hormuz is on fire, and it is flowing. Seven attacks on commercial shipping were reported in and around the world's most important oil chokepoint in the past week, according to shipping intelligence firm Marisks — at least one a day in the Strait of Hormuz or the Gulf of Aden since October 2, logged by the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency. On Monday alone, five incidents were reported in or near the strait: four tanker attacks and one Iranian vessel ordered to turn back by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Marisks now warns of a "heightened and increasingly unpredictable kinetic threat" to vessels transiting the narrow corridor through which a fifth of the world's daily oil and gas passes. The deadliest recent strike fell on the very large crude carrier Kazimah III, hit by an unknown projectile on October 1 while operating in the strait. An onboard blaze forced the full evacuation of the crew. The tanker had discharged two million barrels of Kuwaiti crude at Oman's Ras Markaz port on September 17; its Kuwaiti owner had no comment to make when asked. Nobody has claimed the attack. And yet the barrels keep moving. Gulf oil exporters topped pre-war levels for about half of September, according to provisional shipping data from Kpler released on Monday: the seven-day moving average for crude exports from the region reached 18.3 million barrels per day on September 30, exceeding pre-war benchmarks on 14 days of the month. The surge was driven above all by Saudi Arabia, loading from both the Red Sea and the Gulf — a scramble that accelerated three weeks after the September 10 attack on the kingdom's East-West pipeline. Riyadh says the pipeline is now pumping 5.8 million barrels a day. Iraq's state-owned tanker company has chartered vessels to load Basra crude inside the strait itself after Baghdad secured Iranian permission in August. Analysts say ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman, the industry's workaround, have now reached their limits. This is the paradox of a war economy: volumes recover while risk explodes. More supertankers are shuttling crude through Hormuz because the premium on getting oil out justifies the danger — and the danger is priced into every litre of fuel burned in Asia. Marisks' assessment is blunt: the recent pattern may reflect Iranian forces firing missiles into a predetermined "kill box" engagement area, meaning a merchant vessel's mere physical presence in the zone at the wrong time is the exposure. Crews — many of them Indian, Filipino, Bangladeshi and African — are the ones living inside that kill box. The wider war keeps spreading. On Monday, Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces retook the Bab el-Mandeb strait from the Houthis, seizing the Red Sea's other chokepoint. Tehran is advancing legislation to declare full Iranian control over Hormuz, which the Trump administration has rejected. The US Navy has refused industry requests for military escorts through the strait, citing excessive risk — leaving civilian crews to sail a battlefield alone. So the numbers will look fine on a spreadsheet. The exports exceed pre-war levels. The pipelines are repaired. The premiums are collected. The only things that cannot be rebuilt are the ships and the sailors — and nobody in the war room is counting either.