Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the country's ideological military force, declared the new Strait of Hormuz corridor backed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) "unacceptable and dangerous" on Thursday 25 June, ordering every vessel to coordinate with the IRGC Navy on Channel 16 or face "enforcement measures"1. The IMO is the United Nations agency that regulates international shipping; its coordination gave the toll-free Oman route procedural standing. The IRGC's rejection strips that standing in a single statement.
Hours earlier in Manama, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) foreign ministers that the bloc backed free passage with no charges of any kind, a separate communique that rejects the IRGC scheme outright2. The Iran-Oman fee committee signed in Muscat two days earlier is still negotiating its management mechanism with no published tariff. Three authorities now claim the same 33-kilometre chokepoint, through which a fifth of the world's oil passes, and each rules out the other two.
The Channel 16 demand rests on the corps's own prior declarations rather than any new capability. The IRGC formally closed Hormuz on 11 June citing Israeli strikes on Lebanon, then mandated insurance through its Persian Gulf Strait Authority and reserved fees from 17 August. Each step has been a press release, not an interdiction. The Korean masters sailed on Thursday; the corps issued a statement. One IRGC boarding of a foreign hull would collapse the divergence between word and act, and none has come.
