In a show of force, Iran seizes MSC ship linked to Zodiac Marine
Commandos from Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard descended from a helicopter onto an Israeli-affiliated container ship near the Strait of Hormuz and seized it on Saturday, the latest in a series of attacks between the two countries.
The Middle East has been bracing for potential Iranian retaliation following a suspected Israeli attack earlier this month on an Iranian consular building in Syria that killed 12 people, including a senior Guard general who once commanded the Force Shipping Quds. Here is a video of the boarding:
Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, began six months ago and is inflaming decades-old tensions across the region. With Iranian-backed forces such as Lebanon's Hezbollah and Yemen's Houthi rebels also caught up in the fighting, each new attack in the Middle East threatens to escalate the conflict into a broader regional war.
Iranian state agency IRNA said a Guard navy special forces unit carried out the attack on the vessel, which other media outlets in the country have widely identified as the Portuguese-flagged MSC Aries, a container ship associated with Zodiac Maritime , based in London.
Zodiac Maritime is part of Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer's Zodiac Group. Zodiac declined to comment and referred questions to MSC, which did not immediately respond.
Earlier, a Middle East defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, shared a video of the attack with The Associated Press. In it, Iranian commandos are seen lowering themselves onto a pile of containers sitting on the deck of the ship.
A member of the ship's crew is heard saying: "Don't go out." He then tells his colleagues to go to the deck of the ship, while other commandos descend on the deck. One commando is seen kneeling above the others to provide them with potential covering fire.
The video matches the known details of the MSC Aries. The helicopter used appeared to be a Soviet-era Mil Mi-17 helicopter, which both the Guard and Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis have used in the past to conduct commando raids on ships.
The British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations described the vessel as "seized by regional authorities" in the Gulf of Oman, off the Emirati port city of Fujairah, without elaborating. The ship's crew, around twenty seamen, is made up of Filipinos.
A greater threat than missiles
With this move, Iran shows that the spotter is much superior to the missiles or drones it could unleash against Israel: in fact, Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz where, among other things, 17% of all world oil transits and a substantial portion of LNG, enough to send the markets into crisis.
The situation is therefore much more complex than it appears on the surface. Iran, instead of throwing itself into a bombardment with dubious effects on Israel, could choose to block, even partially, the Persian Gulf, causing a global energy crisis, or difficulties for Western societies.
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The article In a show of force, Iran seizes MSC ship linked to Zodiac Marine comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/in-una-dimostrazione-di-forza-liran-sequestra-nave-msc/ on Sat, 13 Apr 2024 13:20:34 +0000.