The video lasts 40 seconds. A speedboat focuses on one side of the oil tanker Safesea Vishnu, off the coast of Umm Qasr in southern Iraq. It is midnight on Wednesday. The water is calm. A powerful explosion, followed by another one likely triggered by the first, sets the ship ablaze and sends up a huge plume of smoke. It is an attack. The small boat filming the scene waits a few seconds before speeding off northeast toward Iran. One of the crew members shouts: “God is the greatest. Destruction of an American oil tanker in the northern Persian Gulf. At your service, Khamenei!” As the camera captures the burning bow of the Safesea Vishnu, another cargo ship, the Zephyros, appears alongside. The two vessels were transferring cargo from one to the other. The spokesman on the speedboat identified himself as a member of the Naval Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military pillar of the Iranian regime. A few hours later, the price of Brent crude oil exceeded $100.

The largest U.S. naval deployment since the 2003 invasion of Iraq has decimated the Iranian Navy. Washington has sent nearly 40% of its operational ships to the Middle East (16 warships plus the aircraft carriers USS Gerald Ford and USS Abraham Lincoln). According to the war report released Thursday by CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command with jurisdiction in the region), approximately 60 Iranian frigates have been destroyed since February 28. This exceptional show of force, however, has proven insufficient in the face of Tehran’s asymmetric retaliation, as demonstrated by the attack carried out Wednesday night off the coast of Iraq.

Analysis of the video footage and the damage inflicted on the Safesea Vishnu suggests that the attackers used a naval drone to blow up the hull. The explosion damaged both cargo ships, which were moored side-by-side. This unconventional tactic has been used before with great success by the Ukrainian Navy to counter Russia’s powerful Black Sea Fleet.

The price for disabling a ship—the type and complexity of the naval bombs used by Iran are unknown, but the most sophisticated ones in the Ukrainian arsenal cost around $250,000—is low compared to the major blow dealt to the crude oil trading market on which the West depends. This is especially true given the target: according to records from the maritime traffic publication Lloyd’s List, the cargo ship that was hit is indeed owned by the American company Safesea Group.

South of Iraq, the waters of the Gulf flow toward the Strait of Hormuz, the heart of the current battle being waged between the United States and Israel against the Iranian regime. Its new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, reaffirmed on Thursday his intention to keep the waterway closed, under the de facto control of the Iranian armed forces—Oman, on the western shore of the strait, is unable to challenge Iranian supremacy in the region. Around 20% of the world’s traded crude oil passes through this strait. Its sellers are neighboring Gulf countries allied with the United States and, therefore, in Tehran’s crosshairs. Since the start of the Israeli-American offensive, traffic has been virtually blocked, with hundreds of ships waiting on both sides of the strait.

Iran holds the initiative in the Strait of Hormuz, while the United States struggles to extricate itself from the impasse and wage a maritime battle that is virtually unparalleled, both in terms of the weapons in use and the resources at stake. The strait’s narrowest point measures just over 20 nautical miles (39 km), but the navigable channel is less than 2.5 miles wide (4 km), a narrow and vulnerable space for mounting an escort to guarantee safe passage. “Defense vessels would have very little time to react to an imminent threat,” notes Mike Plunket, an analyst at the defence intelligence company Janes. According to his calculations, there are approximately 400 merchant ships waiting to pass. The U.S. Navy could provide about eight destroyers in the short term for escort duty. The result: it’s possible to form small convoys, perhaps with four or five merchant ships protected by two destroyers.

Beyond the risk and time such a solution would require, it would be insufficient to stabilize crude oil prices—to which must be added potential increases in rates from cargo ship insurers, something that shipping companies have experience with in Black Sea ports. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, after several contradictory messages earlier in the week, stated this Thursday that his country is not ready to implement a maritime escort, although perhaps it might be by the end of the month.

Plunket also points out that, while the Iranian Navy may have been significantly reduced, Tehran’s arsenal for asymmetric warfare includes so-called fast coastal attack craft, a flotilla of small, high-speed vessels under the control of the Revolutionary Guard. These boats, armed with machine guns and rocket launchers, similar to the one seen in the video of the attack on the oil tanker Safesea Vishnu, are used by the regime in a swarm-like fashion to harass and overwhelm large ships in the Gulf.

The report issued Thursday by CENTCOM estimated that approximately 30 Iranian minelayers had been damaged or destroyed in the nearly two weeks of the conflict. U.S. President Donald Trump himself threatened Wednesday to launch a fierce attack if his military found a single mine in the Gulf waters, a tactic former president Ronald Reagan used in the late 1980s after the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck one of these mines in the same waters. According to CNN and CBS, the Iranian Navy has already begun laying mines. So far, no incidents involving these devices have been reported.

Iran’s arsenals are estimated to contain around 6,000 mines of various types, from conventional surface mines to the most sophisticated ones lying on the seabed. Again, the challenge lies not in the type of munition—many of the U.S. frigates are equipped with mine-clearing systems—that can damage and disable a cargo ship, but rather in the effect of a single mine.

“Once a mine is discovered,” the Janes analyst continues, “you have to assume there are many more in the water. This means that the routes will have to be swept continuously to ensure there are no more. It requires specialized ships, equipment, and personnel, and it’s a very slow and dangerous process even in peacetime. If you add to that the possibility of the minesweepers themselves being attacked, the complexity increases.” Ukraine’s experience has once again shown how costly it is, in terms of both resources and time, to clear the waters of these types of devices. There are still access routes to the Black Sea in the south of the country where demining operations are currently underway.

And while the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked at Tehran’s discretion, as reported Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal and corroborated by the maritime traffic monitoring company TankerTrackers.com, Iran is now exporting more oil than before the start of the U.S. and Israeli attack.

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Iran has thrown energy markets into turmoil by turning on the fan of chaos, while continuing to retaliate against attacks by Israel and the United States despite its clear military inferiority. Nearly two weeks after the start of the US-Israeli military offensive on February 28, several attacks attributed to Iran have now struck six ships in the Persian Gulf, three of them on Thursday: two in the Iraqi port of Basra and the third a container ship in waters of the United Arab Emirates. These are in addition to the three cargo ships attacked on Wednesday. In his first purported message, read on state television, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mukhta Khamenei, asserted that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz must continue “as a tool to pressure the enemy.”

The speech by the new 56-year-old president was defiant. But the message was not delivered by him directly, nor have Iranians seen or heard their new head of state in person, not even on video. Instead, a presenter on Iranian state television read his words with a photograph of him against the backdrop of the country’s tricolor flag. This circumstance could fuel rumors about his health that have been circulating in recent days. An official Iranian source confirmed to Reuters on Wednesday that the new supreme leader was “slightly” injured in the bombing that killed his father on the first day of the war.

Khamenei called for unity and issued other threats, such as that his country will attack all U.S. bases in the region. The leader also urged his neighbors to ‘clarify’ their position regarding those he has defined as “the murderers of our people,” referring to the U.S. and Israel. He mentioned the attack, attributed to Washington, on a school in Minab, where 175 people were killed, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12. He also referred to the “martyrdom” of his father, whose memory he honored.

The supreme leader’s message confirmed that his country will continue with its strategy of spreading chaos throughout the region and even globally, accompanying conventional warfare with hybrid and commercial warfare by disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil, among other raw materials, passes.

The new attacks on ships have once again driven the price of a barrel of crude oil above the psychological barrier of $100. The initial bombings had forced Trump the day before to release 172 million barrels of oil reserves, the same day that some 30 countries belonging to the International Energy Agency (IEA) agreed to put approximately 400 million barrels onto the market.

On the other hand, the Iranian regime has responded to the “large-scale” bombings announced by Israel—explosions have been reported in Tehran, Isfahan (central Iran), Saqqez (Iranian Kurdistan), and other locations—with new attacks on Israeli territory and against neighboring countries in the Middle East. Tehran has also coordinated with its Lebanese ally, the Shiite political party and militia Hezbollah, to launch an unprecedented attack with 200 projectiles, according to Israeli media, against northern Israel.

Several drones have also struck a building and Kuwait International Airport, a building in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, as well as fuel depots near the capital of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. In the last 24 hours, the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan has been hit by 40 drones and missiles, according to Rudaw, the main regional television channel. One of those projectiles struck an Italian military base in Erbil, in that Iraqi region, according to Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto, who expressed his conviction that the attack was “deliberate.”

Some 2,000 people have already died in this war, according to official figures from the various countries involved. Of these, more than 1,200 (many civilians) have died in Iran, followed by Lebanon, with more than 600 deaths in Israeli attacks. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has reported that, after 13 days of conflict, there are more than 3.2 million internally displaced people in Iran, a fact that fuels fears in neighboring countries like Turkey of a massive influx of refugees.

No clear end in sight

Regional instability, human drama, and disruption to energy markets, as well as the military resistance being put up by the Iranian regime, belie Trump’s declaration of having “won the war” on Wednesday at a sort of pre-campaign rally in Kentucky, with his eyes on the crucial midterms in November.

“Those who pushed for this war, in Jerusalem and Washington, are realizing that they’ve gotten themselves into a major mess” Michael Young, an analyst at the Middle East Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, emphasized in a message on X.

While the facts on the ground belie Trump’s triumphalism, so too do the U.S. intelligence services, which believe the Iranian regime is not close to collapsing. In their view, neither the bombing that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war, nor the deaths of numerous regime officials, nor the military targets hit have pushed the Islamic Republic to the brink.

This is indicated by a multitude of U.S. intelligence reports, cited this Thursday by Reuters, which assure that the Islamic Republic is not at risk of collapsing and that it maintains control over the population, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called upon to rise up against their political system.

Three objectives

In addition to the goal of overthrowing the regime, on which Trump has contradicted himself several times—unlike Israel—Washington defined three major objectives for its military campaign. However, according to a report published Thursday by The New York Times, citing Trump’s advisers, it did so without anticipating that Tehran would wage economic war by closing the Strait of Hormuz if the country were attacked, something Tehran had constantly threatened to do.

The first of these objectives was to completely dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, which, incidentally, the U.S. president had already declared “obliterated” after 12 days of bombing in June 2025. The idea was to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, a goal that Iran has always denied pursuing.

The second objective was to destroy Iran’s missile capabilities; and the third was to permanently bury the Islamic Republic’s network of alliances with regional militias in the Middle East—especially Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

None of these objectives has been fully achieved at this point.

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Irán ha elegido al clérigo Mojtaba Jameneí para suceder a su padre, el fallecido Ali Jameneí, como líder supremo del país, han anunciado este domingo a última hora varios medios oficiales iraníes. La designación de quien ya es el tercer máximo dirigente en los 47 años de historia de la República Islámica constituye todo un desafío al presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, que hace días tildó su posible elección como “inaceptable”. Horas antes de que se confirmara el nombramiento, el mandatario había advertido de que el nuevo líder iraní “no duraría mucho” si no contaba con su aprobación. Israel ha amenazado también con acabar con “cualquier sucesor” de Ali Jameneí, el jefe de Estado de 86 años al que su ejército mató con un bombardeo en Teherán el 28 de febrero, el primer día de la guerra.

El nombramiento del segundo hijo del fallecido líder supremo es, ante todo, “un dedo medio” extendido ante Trump y Estados Unidos, pronosticaba hace días en X el investigador iraní Ali Alfoneh, del Instituto de Estudios Árabes del Golfo (AGSI, por sus siglas en inglés). Su elección, reitera este experto en un correo electrónico desde Washington, constituye un “desafío claro a Estados Unidos e Israel”. Con él, el régimen islámico viene a espetarle a Trump: “ Si matáis a un Jameneí, elegiremos a otro”, resume. Jameneí es además un clérigo del que se cree que mantiene fuertes lazos con el aparato militar iraní y su principal actor, la Guardia Revolucionaria.

Seyed Mojtaba Jameneí —Seyed es el tratamiento para los descendientes directos del profeta Mahoma— nació en Mashhad, en el este de Irán, hace 56 años. Se sabe poco de él, destaca Alfoneh, pues “nunca ha concedido entrevistas y solo aparece en público dos veces al año: en los desfiles del día de la Revolución, el 11 de febrero, y del día de Al Quds (Jerusalén), el último viernes del mes de Ramadán”.

Entre lo que sí se sabe, figuran datos como que participó brevemente en la guerra entre Irán e Irak en 1986, cuando con 17 años se incorporó al batallón Habib ibn Mazaher de la 27.ª División Mohammad Rasulollah, vinculada a la Guardia Revolucionaria. También que cuando su padre fue nombrado líder supremo, en 1989, se fue involucrando progresivamente en el entramado del poder, hasta convertirse en un nexo entre la oficina del líder supremo, la milicia Basij, que depende también de la Guardia Revolucionaria, y el aparato de seguridad. Lo hizo sin convertirse por ello en una figura con mucha presencia ante la opinión pública iraní. Siempre ha permanecido en la sombra.

Esa imagen opaca se vio empañada aún más cuando, a finales del pasado mes de enero, una investigación de la agencia Bloomberg lo vinculó con una compleja red millonaria de inversiones y propiedades en Europa y Oriente Próximo. El medio de comunicación atribuía ese entramado financiero a la venta de petróleo iraní eludiendo las sanciones internacionales contra Irán. Las autoridades del país lo han negado rotundamente.

La designación de este clérigo repite en un aspecto la elección de su padre en 1989. Cuando Ali Jameneí fue seleccionado como sucesor del fundador de la República Islámica, Ruholá Jomeini, no contaba con las altas credenciales religiosas necesarias para ello. No solo no era un marjá (una fuente de emulación para los chiíes) sino que ni siquiera era ayatolá, sino un rango clerical inferior, hojatoleslam. Muy pronto fue elevado al estatus de ayatolá.

Con su hijo parece haber sucedido lo mismo. Hasta ahora se consideraba que su rango era el de hojatoleslam. Sin embargo, la Asamblea de Expertos que lo ha elegido y los medios iraníes se refieren a él ya como ayatolá, por lo que parece gozar ya de esa jerarquía superior.

Una diferencia notable con su padre, es, sin embargo, que Mojtaba Jameneí carece de una trayectoria política conocida ni tampoco ha ocupado cargos relevantes en las instituciones iraníes, más allá de esa actuación en la sombra que se le atribuye. Antes de ser nombrado líder supremo, Ali Jameneí había sido presidente de Irán entre 1981 y 1989.

“Es posible que no cumpla plenamente los requisitos constitucionales para el liderazgo, tal y como se definen en el artículo 109 de la Constitución”, destaca Alfoneh, que recuerda también cuál se consideraba el principal obstáculo para la designación del hijo del fallecido líder supremo. Esa barrera era “el hecho de que un régimen que se opone a la monarquía” como es la República Islámica —proclamada tras la revolución que derrocó a la dinastía Pahleví en 1979— “generalmente aborrece un liderazgo hereditario”. Según varias fuentes del régimen iraní, el propio Ali Jameneí, estando en vida, descartó por ese motivo a su hijo como sucesor. La guerra ha podido contribuir a eliminar ese inconveniente.

Otras circunstancias jugaban en favor de Mojtaba Jameneí. La primera es que el pasado jueves Trump tildó su nombramiento de “inaceptable” y se arrogó un supuesto derecho a participar en la elección del nuevo líder iraní. Esas declaraciones probablemente le dieron un espaldarazo al convertir su designación en una bofetada al presidente de Estados Unidos, uno de los dos países que ha desatado la guerra contra Irán.

Un “mártir viviente”

Otro punto a su favor, recuerda Alfoneh, es que Israel intentó asesinarlo hace días en otro bombardeo. Mojtaba Jameneí sobrevivió, pero quedó herido. Ese intento de asesinato frustrado y “el martirio” el 28 de febrero de su padre, de su madre, de su mujer, de su hijo y de su hermana, entre otros parientes —todos muertos en el bombardeo del complejo del líder supremo dirigido a matar a Ali Jameneí— le dota de un aura: la de ser un “mártir viviente”, destaca el experto. Ese concepto chií designa a alguien que ha sido herido, física o moralmente, en un intento de asesinato o en una guerra sagrada y que ha mostrado así su entrega a Dios y su disposición al sacrificio.

Ese “capital simbólico”, destaca Alfoneh, “podría ser suficiente para movilizar aproximadamente al 10% de la población iraní que demostró su apoyo al régimen en las elecciones presidenciales de 2023″.

Luciano Zaccara, profesor de la Universidad de Georgetown en Qatar, resume la elección del tercer líder supremo de la República Islámica con una palabra: ”continuidad”. Con Mojtaba Jameneí, dice, “nada va a cambiar” en la República Islámica.

Horas antes de que se confirmara que Jameneí hijo sería el nuevo líder supremo, varios de los 88 clérigos que se sientan en la Asamblea de Expertos, el organismo encargado formalmente de elegir al sucesor del líder supremo a su muerte, habían avanzado que existía ya un consenso sobre el elegido, si bien no anunciaron su nombre.

“La elección del liderazgo ya se ha efectuado y el líder ha sido designado”, había dicho el ayatolá Ahmad Alamolhoda, un clérigo ultraconservador considerado cercano al ala dura de la República Islámica, a la agencia Tasnim.

Otro integrante de ese organismo clerical, Mohsen Heidari, había dado una pista que apuntaba ya a Jameneí hijo, a quien desde hace días se consideraba el favorito para suceder a su padre. En un vídeo difundido por los medios oficiales iraníes, Heidari desvelaba que el candidato había sido seleccionado basándose en una instrucción del ayatolá Jameneí: la que recomendaba que el máximo líder de Irán fuera alguien “odiado por el enemigo”.