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WASHINGTON – The US Navy has turned back 27 ships trying to enter or exit Iranian ports since a US blockade outside the contested Strait of Hormuz began about a week ago, the military’s Central Command said on April 20.
A US military official also said on April 20 that a team of Marines was searching and scanning a large number of containers aboard the Touska, an Iranian cargo ship that the Navy disabled and seized in the Gulf of Oman on April 19 after it tried to evade the blockade.
It was the first time a vessel was reported to have tried to evade the US-imposed blockade on any ship entering or exiting Iranian ports since it took effect last week.
US officials will determine what to do with the disabled vessel once the search is completed, a US military official said on April 20, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. One option would be to tow the stricken ship to Oman, independent specialists said. An alternative would be to let the Touska steam to an Iranian port, if it can.
The ship’s crew will be returning to Iran soon, a second US military official said.
“The message is out that most ships are not wanting to go out there,” retired vice admiral and former top Middle East Navy commander Kevin Donegan said in an interview on April 20.
The Touska’s captain had ignored multiple radioed US warnings to halt.
The guided-missile destroyer Spruance, one of more than a dozen Navy warships enforcing the US blockade, ordered the vessel’s crew to evacuate its engine room.
The Spruance then fired several rounds from its Mk-45 gun into the ship’s propulsion system as it steamed toward the port of Bandar Abbas in Iran, Central Command said in a statement that included a video of the firing.
The Mk-45 deck gun, located on the Spruance’s bow, can shoot 16 to 20 rounds per minute. The 12.7cm-diameter projectiles it fires weigh about 32kg each and contain the equivalent of roughly 4.5kg of explosive chemical TNT.
A spokesperson for Iran’s military reiterated a threat on April 20 to “take the necessary action against the US military” in response to the ship’s seizure, Iran’s state broadcaster reported. Iran has waited to take action so far in order to protect the ship’s crew and some of their family members, he said.
Social media accounts in Iran said the country had launched retaliatory drone strikes against US Navy ships in the region, a purported attack that the Pentagon said on April 20 never happened.
The Touska was one of “several vessels of interest” that US intelligence analysts have been monitoring in recent days, both inside and outside the blockade boundary, the US military official said.
“We have eyes on every single one of them,” Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command, told reporters on April 17.
General Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on April 16 that US military commanders elsewhere in the world, and especially in the Indo-Pacific region, would “actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran”. NYTIMES
