20AUG

Ships with no Iranian tie quit Hormuz

4 min read

16:36UTC

Lloyd's List Intelligence counted 78 Hormuz transits in the week to 9 August against 95 the week before. The sharpest fall, 63 to 45, came in ships with no Iranian link.

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Key takeaway

Hormuz traffic fell 18 per cent, and the ships with no Iranian link fell 29 per cent.

Lloyd's List Intelligence counted 78 vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz in the week of 3 to 9 August, against 95 the week before, in a brief published on Wednesday 12 August ¹. Of that 78, 45 carried no Iranian link, down from 63. The total fell 18 per cent while the non-Iranian count fell 29 per cent, so the strait is not emptying evenly.

Eighteen owners with no Iranian connection made a different choice this week from the one they made last week. Each of those hulls is a cargo that did not sail, a delivery date that moved, and a war-risk premium an underwriter decided was not worth paying. One caveat travels with the series: this briefing's own figure of 84 weekly transits, published on 7 August , counts to a different week boundary and cannot be added to it.

The two trackers part company on where the remaining ships have gone. Kpler calls the passage now carrying most tanker traffic "the Iranian route", a corridor Tehran announced by itself in April that the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the United Nations shipping regulator, has never approved and that neither Washington nor Brussels recognises ². Lloyd's, in the same 12 August brief, reports activity concentrating instead on the Omani coast, where masters can stay outside Iran's traffic system altogether ³. Both see shipping abandoning the historic centre line. Neither agrees on which shore it moved towards, and the gap is not a rounding error: one reading has Iran gaining control of the waterway, the other has shipping routing around Iran entirely.

For Tuesday 11 August the day counts do not reconcile either. CNN, citing Kpler, reported 14 crossings, 11 of them on the Iranian route and none on the centre line ⁴. A Reuters wire, also citing Kpler and captured at 04:20 GMT the following morning, reported six crossings and gave no route split at all ⁵. Neither is Kpler's own publication for that date, so both stand here and neither is settled. Before the war Kpler counted 120 to 140 crossings a day . The drop lands in the same week Iran's security council chief told China's ambassador the strait reopens only when the United States ends its war .

Deep Analysis

In plain English

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that most Gulf oil has to pass through. Since the war started, ships have increasingly used an alternative route that Iran declared for itself in April, rather than the traditional shipping lane down the middle. Two separate tracking firms, Kpler and Lloyd's List Intelligence, count how many ships cross and by which route, but their most recent numbers for the same day do not match: one says 14 ships, the other says 6. What both agree on is that ships with no connection to Iran are leaving the strait faster than ships that do have an Iranian tie, suggesting foreign shippers increasingly treat the waterway itself as the risk, alongside the war.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Neither Kpler nor Lloyd's List Intelligence can reconcile a single count because both firms infer routing from AIS transponder data, and Kpler's own note on 23 July already flagged that unofficial volumes may be higher than tracked, due to AIS-dark ship-to-ship transfers.

A route Iran declared unilaterally, outside any IMO traffic-separation scheme, has no authoritative registry either tracker can check against: only two private firms interpreting the same patchy signal, with no shared methodology published by either.

What could happen next?

Consequence
A durable fork onto an IMO-unrecognised route would leave transiting vessels without the legal transit-passage protections the historic centre line carries, raising insurance and liability questions for any incident that occurs on it.
Risk
Because the two main trackers cannot currently agree on a single day's vessel count, any policy response built on either figure risks acting on a snapshot rather than a verified trend.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources from United Kingdom, France and 1 more

United Kingdom

France

United States

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Primary parallel: During the 1984-88 Tanker War, Kuwait reflagged its tankers under the US flag so they could travel a corridor US warships were committed to defending, splitting Gulf shipping onto a track each side could contest without either conceding the strait itself. Today's fork between the historic centre line and Iran's own route follows the same logic: traffic did not stop, it forked.

Counter-parallel: The 1987 Kuwaiti reflagging came with an explicit US Navy escort commitment and a published corridor. Iran's April-declared route has neither an IMO endorsement nor any naval guarantee, and Kpler's own analysts caution that unofficial volumes on it may run higher still, since ships increasingly cross with AIS transponders switched off for ship-to-ship transfers.

Lloyd's List Intelligence's own weekly Transit Monitor recorded a second consecutive fall: 78 total transits in the week to 9 August against 95 the week before, and non-Iranian-linked transits down 29% to 45 from 63, reversing the recovery the same tracker had flagged five days earlier when weekly transits rose to 84 from 45 .

That reversal means the story is not simple recovery from the July collapse. Vessels with no Iranian tie are leaving the waterway roughly twice as fast as the fleet overall, which is consistent with non-Iranian-linked shippers judging the unrecognised Iranian route, or the risk of using it, worse than staying out of the strait altogether.

Consensus view: Kpler's day-level tracking, relayed by CNN, counted 14 vessels crossing the strait on 11 August, 11 of them via what Kpler's own 23 July blog calls the "Iranian unilateral route", a corridor Tehran announced itself in April but which carries no IMO recognition and no US or EU sign-off. None crossed via the historic centre line.

Counter-view: A Reuters wire relayed by Al-Monitor, The Hill and BOE Report, citing the same Kpler dataset but captured at 0420 GMT the following morning, put 11 August's total at just 6 vessels, four inbound and two outbound, against a 10-day average of roughly 11 a day, and reported no route breakdown at all.

Key tension: Whether the near-total shift onto the Iranian route is a structural change in how shippers now navigate Hormuz, or an artefact of two different snapshots taken from the same underlying feed at different times of day.

First Reported In

Update #170 · The ships Iran does not control are leaving Hormuz

Lloyd's List Intelligence· 14 Aug 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Hormuz transits rise to an eighth of normal

This week's 78-transit reading follows last week's 84-transit count from the same tracker.

Occurred 6 Aug 2026

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This Event

Ships with no Iranian tie quit Hormuz

The composition of Hormuz traffic moved faster than the total, and the two firms watching the water disagree on which shore the departing ships have moved to.

Led to

Five ships crossed Hormuz in a day

Departing Hormuz traffic already skewed non-Iranian on 12 August; by 16 August the transit count had collapsed further to five vessels a day.

Occurred 16 Aug 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

UK Maritime Trade Operations

UKMTO logged six armed men boarding a tanker 136 nautical miles east of Al Mukalla on 20 August and redirecting it toward Somalia. A vessel steered toward the Somali coast reads as an attempted seizure, a distinct hazard from the stand-off strikes the same lane has seen before.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf

Iran's Majlis speaker received Iraq's Hormuz carve-out request in Baghdad on 19 August, a request that treats passage as Tehran's to grant. Ghalibaf's authority over that grant sits alongside the Revolutionary Guard's separate transit rules, which have moved independently of Iran's foreign ministry before.

Haibat al-Halbousi

Iraq's parliament speaker asked Iran for special consideration on Iraqi Hormuz oil exports during Ghalibaf's 19 August Baghdad visit. Iraq presses the request from a weak position: Iran's central bank is simultaneously demanding Baghdad release Iranian reserves parked in Iraqi accounts.

Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research

Switzerland's economics ministry updated the Article 21 forms governing lawful Iran money transfers on 19 August, with only the revised forms accepted from 26 August. Bern operates one of the few remaining legal Iran payment channels and has just set a hard cutover on its control point.

Motegi Toshimitsu

Japan's foreign minister said in Muscat on 20 August that Tokyo wants closer coordination with Oman on safe Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb passage. Japan has no naval presence of its own in the strait, so it is routing the ask through the state negotiating with Iran instead.

Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi

Oman's foreign minister joined Japan's in Muscat on 20 August to call for intensified coordination on Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb navigation. Oman also runs the mediation track with Tehran, so the appeal travels through the same channel as the negotiation.