Iran has blamed the United States military presence in the Gulf region for causing widespread marine pollution, calling for compensation worth what it described as “trillions of dollars” in damage to its coastlines.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei made the accusation at a press briefing on Monday, pointing to recent oil pollution that reached the shores of Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz as evidence of deepening environmental harm linked to the conflict.
“This environmental damage stems from the US military presence and the wars it has waged in the region over the past five decades,” Baghaei said.
“The damage caused to the environment of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman is not solely linked to this war.”
Baghaei placed the incidents in a broader historical pattern, saying decades of military activity and commercial shipping had imposed “trillions of dollars in damage” on Iran’s coastal areas.
“Who bears responsibility for compensating these damages? Is it the nations that consume the inexpensive energy exported from our region, the shipping insurers, or the aggressors and their partners who have transformed the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman into a theatre for military operations?” he said.
However, independent ship-tracking platform TankerTrackers offered a sharply different account of the Qeshm spill, saying the oil most likely originated from an Iranian attack on the Liberian-flagged bulk carrier Minoan Pioneer in Omani waters on August 3, with the resulting slick drifting across the strait toward Iran’s coastline.
Iranian environmental officials said the pollution, which affected approximately 32,000 square metres of coastline and 90,000 square metres of water near mangrove forests and hawksbill turtle nesting sites on Qeshm Island, had been largely cleaned up by August 12.
A separate and far larger environmental crisis is simultaneously unfolding off the coast of Oman, where a grounded Russian shadow fleet tanker, the Caroline Bezengi, has been leaking crude oil in a protected marine area, creating a slick some estimates put at 2,000 square kilometres.
Omani state media confirmed the slick had reached beaches in the Ras Madrakah area in the country’s southeast.
That incident has not been linked to the Iran-US conflict.
Baghaei said Iran, which holds the longest coastline along both the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, could not remain indifferent to what he described as a mounting environmental crisis.
He called for environmental protection to form part of any future arrangements governing the Strait of Hormuz, adding that every party benefiting from commercial shipping through the waterway carried both a legal and moral obligation to address the harm being done.
(The Whistler)