Two foreign tankers were struck by an explosive small boat in Iraqi territorial waters before dawn on 12 March, setting both vessels alight and killing one crew member while 38 sailors were rescued. The attacks occurred off the port of Umm Qasr, on the western shore of Al-Zubayr Bay about 50km south of Basra; Iraq’s Joint Operations Command described the incidents as violations of Iraqi sovereignty and has dispatched six vessels to search for missing crew and assist survivors.
The assaults come amid a sharp regional escalation after recent US and Israeli strikes on Iran. Shipping through the nearby Strait of Hormuz — the artery for roughly one-fifth of seaborne oil flows — has effectively become a bottleneck: hundreds of vessels are waiting outside the corridor, insurers and owners are treating passage as high risk, and maritime traffic managers report about ten attacks on ships in the area in recent days.
Tehran has framed the disruption as enforcement of its claimed control over the Strait, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps asserting the right to strike vessels it deems affiliated with the United States, Israel or their partners. Washington, for its part, says it has largely established air superiority over much of Iran and is pressing to reduce Tehran’s ability to project force along the Strait; President Donald Trump has vowed limited use of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to calm markets and repeatedly offered the prospect of naval escorts though commanders say escorting commercial traffic is being weighed against significant risk.
Markets have reacted swiftly. US retail gasoline prices averaged $3.58 per gallon on 11 March — a 21-month high and up roughly 22 percent from a month earlier — while diesel has risen even faster to about $4.89 per gallon. Benchmark crude futures jumped roughly 7 percent, pushing West Texas Intermediate toward $93 a barrel and Brent near $99. In response to the shock, the International Energy Agency’s 32 member countries agreed to release an aggregate of 400 million barrels from strategic stores; Washington said the US would begin releasing 172 million barrels from its SPR, while Germany, South Korea and Japan announced separate national releases.
European leaders and the G7 have warned that the Strait’s deterioration is already imposing a heavy economic toll. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said higher energy bills linked to the strikes had cost Europeans roughly €3 billion in extra import payments and floated measures including gas price caps. Some smaller states have taken domestic steps to blunt consumer pain: Slovakia temporarily froze pump prices for five days to buy time to reassess market measures.
The immediate effect of coordinated SPR releases is to signal a policy response and to dampen panic in the short term, but they do not remove the structural vulnerabilities exposed by sustained hostilities. Insurance premiums, rerouting costs, and the prospect of further attacks will keep upward pressure on energy costs while raising the prospect that private firms and neutral states will increasingly avoid transits through the Strait entirely. For Iraq the incident is a reminder that its waters and ports have become a theater for third-party power competition, complicating Baghdad’s already fragile relations with Iran, the United States and regional shipping interests.