US and Iran trade fire around Hormuz again, and Baghdad pays for it in barrels

The United States and Iran exchanged strikes over the weekend for the first time in a month, according to Just Security’s Early Edition of 31 August. Capt. Tim Hawkins, spokesman for US Central Command, said US forces attacked two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island that were attempting to disperse sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had fired in response at air bases in Jordan and the UAE. Jordan’s armed forces claim to have intercepted and destroyed eight missiles. The UAE’s Defence Ministry denied Iranian reports that Al Minhad Air Base had been targeted, while confirming it had intercepted an Iranian drone over its waters. Note the asymmetry: the American strike is confirmed by a named officer; half the Iranian retaliation claim is denied by the government of the stated target. President Trump told Fox News on 31 August: “We’re going to hit them hard. There will be a response.” Hours earlier, the Times of Israel records, he posted AI-generated footage of an attack on Iran’s Kharg Island.

Iraq is not a party to this exchange and absorbs its economics. Al Jazeera reported on 1 August that Iraqi oil exports collapsed by more than 80 percent in the weeks after the US and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February, monthly oil revenues falling from around $6bn to under $2bn as Gulf shipments were disrupted. The Kirkuk–Ceyhan pipeline, the alternative that does not touch Hormuz, was carrying about 170,000 barrels a day against a capacity of 1.5 million, according to Turkish data cited by Al Jazeera — roughly half what Iraqi officials projected in April, when a North Oil Company source told Kurdistan24 that Basra crude moving through the Kurdistan pipeline would lift the route to 330,000 bpd. The grid runs on the same arithmetic. Electricity Ministry spokesman Ahmed Moussa told the state news agency, as reported by Reuters, that the complete halt of Iranian gas flows knocked around 3,100 MW offline almost immediately; production stood at 29 GW against roughly 40 GW of baseline demand.

Assessment: Baghdad’s position is the one nobody scripts: it needs the strait open, the pipeline full and neither belligerent offended. Parliament Speaker Haybat al-Halbousi’s request that Tehran grant Iraqi cargoes special treatment through Hormuz, made to visiting Iranian speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, is the quiet admission that Iraq’s export lifeline is held by a third party. Ghalibaf answered by blaming US policy and, at a separate press conference, praising Iraq’s armed factions for making “resistance” a global power. That is the bind behind the disarmament deadline: the state is being asked to strip the militias in the same weeks it is asking their patron for shipping favours.