Late on Tuesday 1 September the Sidr, a very large crude carrier operated by Saudi Arabia's Bahri, and the Senegal Prosperity, operated by South Korea's Sinokor, were struck by unidentified projectiles minutes apart as they left the strait of Hormuz, northeast and east of Khasab in Oman1. Both were running with their automatic identification transponders switched off, the equipment that broadcasts a vessel's position to other traffic and to shore. The Sidr anchored near the Omani coast afterwards. No party claimed responsibility, and no casualty figure or damage assessment has been published.
Switching off a transponder buys concealment at a price. A tanker that stops broadcasting is harder for a targeting cell to find and harder for a rescue coordinator to reach, and it drops out of the commercial tracking datasets that everyone outside the two militaries relies on to describe this waterway. Owners have been making that trade since the spring; the consequence is that the ships most exposed to attack are the ones least visible in any independent count of traffic.
A projectile struck a Hormuz-transiting vessel on 18 August, killing one crew member, and three Emirati tankers were attacked in three days the week before that. What separates this pair is the flag on the paperwork: a Saudi state-linked operator and a South Korean one, hit on the same evening, on the exit leg of a corridor the escorting command had called clear.
Attribution has not followed any of these attacks, and an unclaimed strike buys something a claimed one does not. It puts risk on the whole approach without committing anyone to the escalation that an admitted attack on a Saudi state-linked hull would carry.
