22OCT

Al Funtas is struck and files no report

4 min read

17:22UTC

A projectile hit the Kuwaiti supertanker Al Funtas on the evening of 28 September while it sailed dark. The tanker filed no report, and the Royal Navy-run desk that merchant ships warn each other through learned of the strike late and from a third party.

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ConflictDeveloping

Key takeaway

A dark transit saved nothing and cost the fleet its own early warning on four tanker strikes.

A projectile hit Al Funtas (IMO 9653408), a Kuwaiti supertanker operated by Kuwait Oil Tankers Company, on the evening of Monday 28 September 2026⁠¹. The fire it started was put out, the crew was unhurt and the ship got under way again⁠². Al Funtas was sailing dark, with the transponder that broadcasts a ship's identity and position switched off, and it filed no report of the strike. United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), the Royal Navy-run desk that merchant ships report attacks to, learned of it late and through a third party⁠³.

That is the bill for a tactic 86 per cent of crude-laden tankers have adopted since 7 July, 72 of 84 on Kpler's count⁠⁴. Going dark did not save Al Funtas, and it delayed the warning to every ship sailing behind it. UKMTO is not a surveillance system; it is a switchboard that only knows what masters tell it. A fleet that has switched off its transponders to avoid being targeted has also switched off the mechanism by which it warns itself, and the loss compounds with every transit.

Three more tankers were struck on Tuesday 29 September. One was an engine-room explosion 36 nautical miles north of Dubai with 24 people aboard, which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran's ideological military force, claimed and called Israeli without independent confirmation⁠⁵. Lloyd's List now counts 81 incidents in the campaign, 74 attacks and 7 near misses⁠⁶.

Attribution has failed before on this water. Iran called the tanker El Gaia a mine casualty and CENTCOM called it a missile strike, and no third party settled it. Al Funtas was also absent from the non-compliant vessel list published by the body calling itself the Persian Gulf Strait Authority⁠⁷, so the one list owners and charterers could screen against has stopped matching the water. Five ships hit in a week, one claim, and no reliable record of who did any of it.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Ships normally broadcast their identity, position and course on a public radio system called AIS, short for automatic identification system. It is how coastguards, navies and other ships know who is nearby. Since The Gulf fighting began, most oil tankers have been switching it off, which sailors call going dark, in the hope that attackers cannot pick them out. On the evening of 28 September 2026 something hit the Kuwaiti supertanker Al Funtas while it was sailing dark. The fire was put out, nobody was hurt and the ship carried on. But it did not report the attack itself, so the Royal Navy information centre that warns other ships, United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, found out late and from someone else. The next day three more tankers were hit, one of them an engine-room explosion with 24 people aboard about 36 nautical miles north of Dubai. The awkward part is that going dark did not save Al Funtas. It was hit anyway, and the hiding made the warning to everyone else slower.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The warning system and the concealment tactic are the same system, used in opposite directions. Automatic identification system broadcasts are what United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, naval escorts and other masters use to build a common picture of who is where. Al Funtas was transiting dark, did not report its own strike, and the alert reached UKMTO late and through a third party. The ship bought no protection by going dark, and the delay it caused fell on every other vessel in the area.

Windward recorded 55 AIS-visible transits between 16 and 23 September 2026, about 94 per cent below a pre-war figure of roughly 910 vessels a week, while other trackers counted traffic an order of magnitude apart over the same days. Nobody escorting, underwriting or routing a ship through the strait is reading an instrument the ships have not already learned to defeat.

Escalation

Up, in tempo rather than in weapon. Four tankers struck over 28 and 29 September is a higher rate than the campaign's average across 81 recorded incidents, and the engine-room explosion is a different signature from the projectile strikes elsewhere.

The point that would tip this further is a casualty on a dark ship whose late report costs lives, or a decision by a flag state to require AIS transmission as a condition of war-risk cover, which would force the traffic back into view and change the targeting problem for both sides.

What could happen next?

Risk
A ship hidden from an attacker is also hidden from a rescuer, so the reporting delay that followed the Al Funtas strike will repeat on a casualty where minutes decide survival.
Immediate · Assessed
Meaning
Al Funtas being absent from the published non-compliant list removes the only public rule a shipowner could try to comply with.
Short term · Reported
Consequence
With most tonnage invisible, attack-rate figures lack a traffic base, so war-risk premiums are being set from incident counts alone.
Short term · Assessed
Precedent
If flag states or underwriters require AIS transmission as a condition of cover, concealment becomes uninsurable and the common picture returns at the cost of making every ship visible to the attacker.
Medium term · Suggested

Source Landscape

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

United Kingdom

United States

Iran

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Primary parallel: Sanctioned Iranian and Venezuelan tankers began switching off their automatic identification systems from about 2018 to evade enforcement, and the practice was treated as evidence of bad faith. The same concealment is now the default for the ships sanctions were meant to protect: 72 of 84 crude-laden tankers, 86 per cent, have sailed dark since 7 July 2026 on Kpler's count. A tactic of the evader has become the standard of the legitimate trade.

Counter-parallel: During the Red Sea attacks of 2023 and 2024, masters broadcast more rather than less, transmitting ownership and crew nationality in plain AIS text to argue their way out of being targeted. That campaign had a stated targeting rule a shipowner could try to satisfy; this one does not, which is why the behaviour has gone the other way.

Underwriting is pricing a population it cannot see. A war-risk quote normally rests on a vessel's own transit history and the recorded incident rate on a route, and both inputs come from AIS. With most crude-laden tonnage dark, the denominator in any attack-rate calculation is a guess, so premiums are being set off the numerator alone: 81 recorded incidents on Lloyd's List's running tally, 74 attacks and 7 near misses.

A large fleet can self-insure part of its exposure and absorb a loss across many hulls; a single-ship owner cannot, and faces a quote built on an incident count without a traffic base. That asymmetry pushes marginal tonnage out of the trade and concentrates Gulf voyages in the fleets best able to carry the risk, which is the mechanism that raises freight before any ship is actually lost.

Consensus view: Lloyd's List notes that Al Funtas, built in 2014, did not appear on the non-compliant vessel list published by the body calling itself the Persian Gulf Strait Authority. If a Kuwaiti national fleet is being hit while off that list, the list has stopped working as a risk signal for owners and charterers, and war-risk assessment moves from vessel-by-vessel to flag-by-flag.

Counter-view: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed only one of the four strikes, the engine-room explosion north of Dubai, and described that vessel as Israeli. On Tehran's account the campaign remains targeted rather than indiscriminate, and the unclaimed strikes belong to someone else. No independent confirmation supports the Israeli characterisation, and no party has accounted for the other three.

Key tension: Whether the published non-compliant list ever governed targeting, or whether it was always a legal costume for a campaign selected on other grounds.

First Reported In

Update #180 · Washington left Iraq as it answered Tehran

Lloyd's List· 1 Oct 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

This Event

Al Funtas is struck and files no report

Sailing dark did not spare the ship and did stop the warning, so each concealed transit now degrades the picture every vessel behind it relies on.

Led to

GFS Pride sinks in the Strait of Hormuz

Ship attacks in and around Hormuz ran on from the late-September tanker strikes to the sinking of GFS Pride.

Occurred 13 Oct 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Wang Yi

China's foreign minister and Djibouti's issued a joint communique on 21 October saying the war should not reach the Horn of Africa and stressing free navigation through Bab al-Mandeb. The text names neither Iran nor the Houthis, and Djibouti hosts China's only overseas military base, opposite the Yemeni coast.

Ministry of External Affairs

India's foreign ministry called the attacks on Saudi civilian and energy sites "unacceptable" on 22 October and said they must stop at once. An Indian died at Dammam, Indians were injured there and at Shaybah, and about 4,000 Umrah pilgrims remain stranded by one MP's count.

Iraq

Iraq closed the al-Sheeb crossing with Iran to travellers and trucks from 21 October and said other crossings would close gradually. Unlike September's closure, which ended on a staged timetable, this one has none, and Iran's interior ministry said it received no notice.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

Egypt's president said on 21 October that Cairo's support would "defend Saudi territory, and does not include an attack on Yemen". Araghchi warned that Egyptian involvement would further complicate the situation, and Cairo's limit matches the one Ankara set on 8 October against attacking another state's soil.

UK Ministry of Defence

The MoD said on 20 October that RAF Typhoons over Saudi Arabia will not strike the Houthis, but extended tanker support to Saudi operations including against Houthi targets in Yemen. The tanker line sets no limit on strikes, so British aircraft may now refuel Saudi jets on bombing runs.

Turkey

Ankara sent the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement to parliament around 20 October, and its published text treats an attack on one party as an attack on all. Article 16 brings it into force only on the last ratification, so the 5 October invocation in Riyadh could not yet bind Turkey.

Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.