International shipping authorities are extremely concerned about the possibility of an environmental disaster in the Red Sea following an attack on a tanker carrying around one million barrels of crude oil.
According to the US military, the Greek-flagged MV Delta Sounion was attacked by sailors from the Iran-aligned Houthi rebel group in Yemen last Wednesday and is now on fire and appears to be spilling oil into the Red Sea.
“The risk of an oil spill with extremely serious environmental consequences remains high and there is widespread concern in the region about the damage that a spill could cause,” Arsenio Dominguez, secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), said in a statement on Wednesday.
Dominguez said he was “very concerned” about the situation.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Pat Ryder said Tuesday that the Sounion is “stuck” in its current position in the Red Sea. The ship's condition “presents both a navigational hazard and a potential environmental hazard,” he said.
The Greek Ministry of Shipping said the ship was en route from Iraq to Greece with two Russian and 23 Filipino crew members on board when it was attacked, according to Liyder news agency. The Sounion's crew has since been evacuated.
The Houthis have been carrying out attacks in the Red Sea in solidarity with the Palestinians in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Last week, Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree posted a video on social media purportedly showing the Sounion on fire, which he described as “Yemeni navy burning the Greek ship Sounion in the Red Sea.”
The situation in Sounion is not the first time that oil tankers have posed significant environmental risks to the Red Sea as a result of tensions with the Houthis.
Oil tankers anchored off the coast of Hodeidah province in Houthi-controlled territory have led to multiple special sessions of the UN Security Council in 2021 and 2020.
The leaking 45-year-old FSO Safer tanker served as a floating storage facility but fell into disrepair after the Saudi-led military campaign against the Houthis in 2015.
Inger Andersson, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, warned at the time that a spill could affect 28 million people whose livelihoods depend on local water and resources.
The 1.1 million barrels of oil aboard the Safer were eventually offloaded onto another tanker in a ship-to-ship transfer that was completed in August 2023.
There have been many calls for a ceasefire and de-escalation in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, but a series of assassinations and extraterritorial attacks in the region make a resolution to the conflict seem unlikely.
Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran in July, and its deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri was killed in Lebanon in January. Fouad Shukr, a senior member of the Iranian-backed Lebanese political group Hezbollah, was targeted in July in an “intelligence-based elimination” operation, according to the Israeli military. The BBC reported:.
In April, an Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, reportedly killed two generals and five other officers. Associated PressThe conflict escalated significantly, with Iran launching retaliatory attacks on Israel.
The latest chapter in the decades-long regional conflict was sparked by an attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed around 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages.
Israel responded with a military campaign to eliminate Hamas, killing around 40,000 Palestinians – some of them Hamas fighters, but the majority of them civilians.
