US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said yesterday that Iran had ‘lost complete control’ of the Strait of Hormuz, saying oil flows through the waterway had returned to near prewar levels.
“The Strait of Hormuz is open. There’s almost as much oil flowing out now as there was before this conflict began. So they’ve lost complete control of the Strait,” Mr Rubio told a Press conference in Athens.
He said Iran was facing ‘crippling sanctions’ and that its economy was in ‘total and complete free fall’. He predicted its economy ‘is about to reach a point that few countries in the world have experienced in terms of how bad it is going to get.’
The seven-day moving average for crude exports from the Gulf was 18.3 million barrels per day on September 30, compared to the average 18m bpd that passed through the region in the 12 months before the Iran war began, according to ship-tracking firm Kpler. The figures include shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea and by other methods.
Rubio accused Iran’s leadership of spending state revenue on Hizbollah, Hamas, Iraqi groups and the Houthis, rather than on infrastructure or improving the lives of Iranians.
“Every dollar that regime gets, they don’t spend it on roads or bridges or helping improve the lives of the Iranian people,” he said. “They spend that money on Hizbollah and Hamas, on militias that fire rockets out of Iraq and on the Houthis. That’s how they spend their money on. They should have spent their money on their people. Instead, they spend their money on terrorism and weapons.”
Brig Gen Mohammad Reza Naqdi, a senior adviser to the IRGC commander-in-chief, maintained Iran’s stance that the Strait is closed and that its armed forces have ‘full control’ over it.
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