WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy has turned back 27 ships trying to enter or exit Iranian ports since a U.S. blockade outside the contested Strait of Hormuz began about a week ago, the military’s Central Command said Monday.
A U.S. military official also said Monday that a team of Marines was searching as many as 5,000 containers aboard the Touska, an Iranian cargo ship that the Navy disabled and seized in the Gulf of Oman on Sunday after it tried to evade the blockade.
It was the first time a vessel was reported to have tried to evade the U.S.-imposed blockade on any ship entering or exiting Iranian ports since it took effect last week.
U.S. officials will determine what to do with the disabled vessel once the search is completed, a U.S. military official said Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. One option would be to tow the stricken ship to Oman, independent specialists said. An alternative would be to let the Touska steam to an Iranian port, if it can.
The ship’s crew will be returning to Iran soon, a second U.S. military official said.
“The message is out that most ships do not want to go out there,” Kevin Donegan, a retired vice admiral and former top Navy commander in the Middle East, said in an interview Monday.
The Touska’s captain had ignored multiple radioed U.S. warnings to halt.
The guided-missile destroyer Spruance, one of more than a dozen Navy warships enforcing the U.S. blockade, ordered the vessel’s crew to evacuate its engine room. The Spruance then fired several rounds from its Mk-45 gun into the ship’s propulsion system as it steamed toward the port of Bandar Abbas in Iran, Central Command said in a statement that included a video of the firing.
The Mk-45 deck gun, located on the Spruance’s bow, can shoot 16 to 20 rounds per minute. The 5-inch-diameter projectiles it fires weigh about 70 pounds each and contain the equivalent of roughly 10 pounds of TNT.
A spokesperson for Iran’s military reiterated a threat Monday to “take the necessary action against the U.S. military” in response to the ship’s seizure, Iran’s state broadcaster reported. Iran has waited to take action so far to protect the ship’s crew and some of their family members, he said.
Social media accounts in Iran said the country had launched retaliatory drone strikes against U.S. Navy ships in the region, a purported attack that the Pentagon said Monday never happened.
The Touska was one of “several vessels of interest” that U.S. intelligence analysts have been monitoring in recent days, both inside and outside the blockade boundary, the U.S. military official said.
“We have eyes on every single one of them,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command, told reporters Friday.
Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday that U.S. military commanders elsewhere in the world, and especially in the Indo-Pacific region, would “actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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