Gulf Oil Is Moving Through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Claim That It Controls the Strait Is Not.

An adviser to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Wednesday that the Strait of Hormuz is closed and that Iranian forces have “full control” of it. Tanker-tracking data for September say the opposite about everyone except Iran.

Mohammadreza Naqdi told the Fars news agency that the strait “is closed, and the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran have full control over it,” and that it would stay that way until Iran’s demands are met. He said a few southern routes along the Omani coast, which he called illegal, would soon be shut. Those passages, he said, were opened by damaging rocky channels and are used by small boats “smuggling oil and transferring it to tankers.” A second IRGC adviser, Majid Mirahmadi, said Thursday that about 10 ships a day are transiting the waterway, against about 125 before the war.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio answered the claim the same day in Athens. “The Straits of Hormuz are open. There is almost as much oil flowing out now as there was before this conflict began,” he told reporters. “So they’ve lost complete control of the straits and their economy.” He said Iran is in free fall and that the economy is “about to reach a place that few countries in the world have been in terms of how bad it’s going to get.”

The volume figures are from Kpler, the tanker-tracking firm. At least 16.5 million barrels a day of crude left the Middle East Gulf in September, matching the pre-war average for the region’s producers other than Iran. That is 10.5 million barrels a day more than the region averaged in March, the first full month after the war shut the strait. A separate seven-day average, reported by The National and covering Gulf crude exports by the strait, the Red Sea, and other routes, stood at 18.3 million barrels a day on Sept. 30, against about 18 million in the 12 months before the war.

Iran is the producer missing from that recovery. Its seaborne crude exports have hovered near zero since the United States reimposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports in July, after the summer ceasefire broke down. President Trump restated that fact Thursday on Truth Social. The blockade “will remain in full force and effect,” he wrote, “with Oil flowing in Record Numbers of Barrels through the Hormuz Strait (22 Million Barrels, last night alone, with not one barrel coming from, or going to, Iran!).”

Max Meizlish, a Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellow and former Treasury sanctions official, told Just the News that the control claim does not survive the export split. “The regime hasn’t been able to export any crude by sea since the blockade was reinstated. If Iran controls the strait, why have its oil exports plummeted?” He said Iran neither has full control nor has lost every lever. What it still has is the ability to target ships, escorted or not. “The idea that Iran controls the strait is laughable.”

That residual threat is not theoretical. A tanker was attacked off Qatar this week as Naqdi was declaring the waterway closed. Automatic identification signals also understate traffic: live AIS counts have shown roughly 10 commercial transits a day against a pre-crisis average near 85, in part because tankers cross with transponders off and because a larger share of Gulf crude now leaves by routes that bypass the strait. The barrels still move. Iran’s do not.

The wartime bet was that choking the corridor would force Washington and the Gulf states to deal on Tehran’s terms. Parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf took a list of conditions for “reopening” the strait to the United Nations last week. Neighbors’ exports are back near where they were. Iran’s are not. The strait Naqdi called closed is carrying their oil.