The "dark" passages through the Strait of Ormuz are getting longer, with oil tankers turning off their "transponders" for several days, as Washington tries to tighten the economic siege on Iran. The practice of navigation without identification, which already existed before, has intensified considerably with the Trump administration's decision to end the exemptions that allowed several countries to import Iranian oil.
The ghost fleet, as this practice of deactivating location systems is known, contradicts the objectives of the so-called Economic Pariah Operation, launched by the United States to financially isolate Tehran. Instead of reducing naval traffic in the region, the American strategy seems to have driven oil tankers to adopt increasingly extreme measures to avoid detection.
Navigation without transponders represents a significant risk for maritime security, increasing the likelihood of collisions and accidents in the strategic strait, through which about a fifth of the world's oil passes. International maritime authorities have expressed concern about this trend, which hinders the monitoring of naval traffic in one of the most important routes of global crude trade.
