Tehran practices piracy in Arabian Gulf in face of economic collapse and sanctions

Eslam Mohamed

In a continuation of its piracy, the Iranian regime has renewed its threat to navigation in international waters through the robbery of commercial ships passing through the Arabian Gulf. On Monday, January 4, 2021, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards detained a South Korean oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz under the pretext of its “violation of marine environmental laws”.

Iranian media published a picture taken from the air to stop the ship at sea, showing the tanker next to it four maritime vessels, including three speedboats, but the Revolutionary Guards did not specify the place of arrest of the tanker, named Hancock Chimi, indicating that it was carrying 7,200 tons of “petroleum chemicals”.

The ship’s crew, consisting of Koreans, Indonesians, Vietnamese and others from Myanmar, was arrested, but their number or details were not specified.

It should be noted that the Iranian naval forces had previously intercepted ships crossing the Gulf, and among the most prominent of these events was the detention of the tanker Stena Impero, which is flying the flag of the United Kingdom in July 2019, accused of hitting a fishing boat, and it was abandoned after about two months in an exchange deal with a detained Iranian ship in Britain.

For its part, Seoul confirmed that Tehran had seized a ship carrying chemicals, and the Korean Defense Minister announced that his country had sent an anti-piracy unit to waters adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz after Iran had arrested the tanker, while the tanker operator denied that the ship had polluted marine waters.

A statement by the company that owns the Korean oil tanker revealed that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards boarded the ship and requested to examine it. The captain of the ship asked about the reason for the examination, but he did not receive a response to his question. The Korean Foreign Ministry also called on the Iranian authorities to quickly release the tanker and the crew safely, according to what was quoted by the official Korean news agency.

However, the head of the Iran-South Korea Chamber of Commerce revealed the reason for the kidnapping by announcing negotiations with the Korean party to swap Iran’s frozen assets with it for types of goods, including the coronavirus vaccine.

Since the outbreak of the Khomeini revolution in 1979, Tehran has adopted the method of kidnapping hostages, as was done at the US embassy in Iran at the time, when diplomats were detained 444 days.

Hassan Abbasi, a leader in the Revolutionary Guards and head of a strategic and ideological research center, suggested during a conference in the city of Nevsehir last year to revive the Iranian economy by kidnapping an American hostage every week and demanding a billion dollars ransom in exchange for returning him to his country.

He said that Tehran obtained $3 billion from Doha as compensation for the killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani during an American operation that took place on January 3, 2020 in Iraq, because the drone that targeted him set off from Qatar. He called for the method of extortion and the threat to obtain ransom money from other countries to overcome the negative effects of the US sanctions.

The Pentagon had announced that it was withdrawing the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the region due to the need for it to confront Iranian threats.

Christopher Miller, Acting Secretary of Defense of the United States, also made it clear in a statement that due to recent threats issued by Iranian leaders against outgoing US President Donald Trump and other US government officials, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz will stop its routine redeployment and will now remain in place in the US Central Command’s area of operations.