CENTCOM says the mines are gone from Hormuz; the third-party transit counts say the strait is still shut

In a video posted to CENTCOM’s accounts early on Friday 28 August, Adm. Brad Cooper said that “internationally recognized transit routes in the Strait are free of Iranian sea mines, thanks to the incredible work of the US military,” that clearance was carried out at the Traffic Separation Scheme using Navy divers, SEALs and aircraft from four services, and that “international shipping lanes are open and momentum is building.” He said US forces had escorted nearly 1,500 commercial vessels carrying some 750 million barrels of crude, turned back about 75 ships attempting to evade the blockade and disabled three, and that no Iranian crude has been exported since the blockade resumed on 14 July. Every one of those figures is supplied by the party making the claim. CBS News, citing a Bloomberg report of 26 August, says some US allies do not accept that the strait has been fully de-mined; Cooper himself conceded that ships still want direct American assistance to make the passage. The IRGC’s answer, carried on Al Jazeera’s live files on Friday and Saturday, is that it retains “decisive control” of the waterway and that US officials are lying about its status to move energy prices.

The only arbiters that are not parties to the war are the traffic counters, and they are in disarray. Kpler, via Al Jazeera, logged 236 ships of all cargo types through Hormuz between 1 and 19 August, against a pre-war baseline the same piece puts at roughly 130 a day — an average of about twelve transits daily against a normal of a hundred and thirty. The straits.live tracker, an aggregator, cites IMF PortWatch recording three transits on 23 August against a pre-crisis baseline of 85 a day, and 425 vessels holding position away from berth at 17:53 UTC on Saturday. Arab News, using initial data, counted five vessels on Thursday 27 August, below the ten-day average. Lloyd’s List Intelligence published two different transit figures for the same week of 27 July to 2 August — 52 and 84 — most likely a vessel-class filter problem, and a warning about how much of this reporting rests on definitions nobody states. What the series share is a direction. Mine clearance and reopening are not the same event.

The corridor talks are where the strait’s future is actually being priced. Iran and Oman issued a joint statement on 25 August describing an interim framework for resuming transits — a temporary shipping corridor plus mine clearance — and Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, discussed it with Araghchi by phone the same day before travelling to Tehran on 27 August. Then, on 26 August, IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi told the state-run Sepah News agency that “agreements have been reached regarding each country’s share of the strait’s waters as well as Iran and Oman’s share of its revenues.” Neither foreign ministry has confirmed that; Oman’s did not respond to Bloomberg. Oman told the UN’s shipping agency in July that it opposes transit fees in the strait. The White House told Al Jazeera on Friday that no talks with Iran are taking place or are scheduled. The downstream consequences are already visible: Iraq’s parliament speaker Haybat al-Halbousi publicly asked Tehran this month for special treatment so Iraqi oil could pass Hormuz, and the FAO/WFP Hunger Hotspots report of 17 June lists shipping disruption at the strait as a compounding factor on food supply in the year’s highest-concern famine contexts.

Assessment: A mine-clearance announcement is a military fact about the seabed. Reopening is a commercial fact about whether owners and underwriters will send hulls. Cooper announced the first and let it be heard as the second, and most of Friday’s coverage obliged. Distrust the numbers on both sides: CENTCOM’s 44-to-75 interdiction progression has US endpoints only, straits.live is an aggregator whose PortWatch baseline of 85 a day is measuring something different from Kpler’s 130, and Pezeshkian’s claim that trade has fallen 35 per cent reached us through a live file with no stated venue or baseline. Distrust the revenue-sharing claim most of all: it is a military institution describing a diplomatic agreement that neither foreign ministry will confirm. If Mohebbi is right, what is being negotiated is a toll regime on an international strait, which is a question for UNCLOS rather than for CENTCOM — and nobody in the Western press has written that piece yet.