After two months of teetering truces, the Middle East is on fire again. After Iran downed an American Apache helicopter, the United States responded with bombs that reportedly hit two water storage tanks on Wednesday, after which Iran retaliated with attacks on – partly American – targets in Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait. Israel is also making no bones about it: thirteen people were killed in bombings in Lebanon on Wednesday.
More violence threatens. In a message on his social medium Truth Social, President Donald Trump announced that the Americans will take the oil transshipment island of Kharg and other “oil infrastructure points” on Thursday evening.
Officially, the Americans have started bombing again because negotiations with Iran are going so smoothly. In the words of Defense Minister Pete Hegseth: “If we have to negotiate with bombs, we negotiate with bombs. And we are very good at that.”
Yet this latest round of fighting cannot be seen separately from the downed helicopter. Trump appeared to feel personally hurt by this Iranian attack, in which the pilots were barely able to escape to safety after a burning drone nestled between them in the cockpit. The duo ended up in the sea, off the coast of Oman, and were tracked down by an unmanned US Navy ship.
“We are going to attack them, and we will attack them very hard,” Trump said on Wednesday after the attack. “Given the helicopter incident, I think we have the right to do so. After all, they brought down an incredible machine.”
That ‘incredible machine’ is also pricey. The helicopter itself already costs 30 to 35 million euros, but according to… a calculation of The Independent the value can reach 45 to 85 million euros per copy if you include weapons, spare parts, training and support packages.
An Apache helicopter at a NATO exercise in the Czech Republic.
Photo ANP
Clandestine passage
More and more is now becoming known about what that helicopter was doing off the coast of Oman. It was previously clear that the devices were used against small Iranian boats in the region. It now appears that the Americans used helicopters in the past two weeks to break the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. They accompanied several dozen commercial ships that passed through the strait without lights and with transponders switched off, sailing close to the Omani coast.
According to the Financial Times (FT) have recently had such fifteen ships a day bypassed the Iranian blockade in this way. On Wednesday, Trump confirmed the “secret operation”, in which he said two hundred ships sailed through the Straits, carrying a total of one hundred million barrels of oil. It is estimated that oil exports from the Gulf reached approximately a quarter of the pre-war volume of twelve million barrels per day in this way.
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“We are all the shadow fleet now,” wrote Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom of The Economist on X. The term “shadow fleet” is normally applied to the smuggling of sanctioned goods from countries such as North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran.
The deployment of army helicopters to escort oil tankers proves how much Trump is committed to driving down the price of gasoline
The Apaches fly high above the ships to detect potential threats from Iranian territory. That’s what they were made for, the retired U.S. Navy commander said Bryan Clark in return for TheTelegraph. “Except that they usually do it against tanks and trucks. But here they can do it against boats and drones.”
Ships at anchor in the Strait of Hormuz.
Photo REUTERS
Shipping bosses warn that the clandestine passages could lead to collisions. “We are talking about a one-lane road with two-way traffic of heavily loaded ships without much maneuverability, as if you were driving along a country road at night without your lights on,” one of them told the FT. The ships sometimes have to pass within eight hundred meters of each other.
The use of army helicopters to escort commercial oil tankers proves how much Trump is committed to driving down the price of gasoline. In response to the American bombings, Iran has announced that it intends to hermetically block the strait, including the passage along the coast of Oman, again.
Water storage tanks destroyed
A US missile strike near the coastal town of Kuhestak, Hormozgan province near the Strait of Hormuz, destroyed two concrete water storage tanks, according to Iranian media. A analysis of satellite images and photos of the damage on location seems according to it The New York Times to point out that this is correct.
It is unclear whether the US knew it was a water facility and whether it deliberately attacked the facility. Satellite images do not show any other buildings near the water plant. The US military did not provide any substantive response to questions from The New York Times.
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Images shared by Iranian state media of affected water installation.
video reuters
Attacking water infrastructure could be a war crime, as the devastating consequences for public health and civilian survival far outweigh any tactical military advantage. The storage tanks would only be a legitimate target if they primarily served the armed forces.
The water supply was finally restored after about twelve hours. Speed was required. About twenty thousand people depend on the plant, Abdolhamid Hamzehpour, director of the Hormozgan Water and Water Waste Company, told the Iranian Mehr News Agency. The temperature in the region is currently rising to fifty degrees.
With the collaboration of Hugo Schiffers