US intelligence officials told the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal this week that Iran deployed at least a dozen naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz during the opening weeks of the war and did not systematically track every placement12. Some mines drifted from their original positions. Iranian authorities cannot reliably map, locate, or recover all of them, and Tehran lacks the capability to remove the mines once found. This is single-provenance US-intelligence reporting, relayed through two American papers; no non-American source has confirmed the assessment independently.
The two models identified are Maham-3, a moored mine with magnetic and acoustic sensors, and Maham-7, a seabed limpet-style device designed to evade sonar3. US officials call Iran's mine-tracking failure "a key factor in Tehran's failure to meet demands from the Trump administration" to reopen the strait. The minefield has become an ungoverned obstacle Iran itself cannot clear.
The IRGC corridor charts Iran published on 9 April, directing traffic through channels near Larak Island, now read less as a coercive toll architecture than as a confession: Tehran does not know which channels are safe because it does not know where its own mines are. That confession reshapes the operational meaning of the toll regime that was producing 20 transits per day on 5 April. What looked like leverage on Monday looks like a trap on Friday.
