World

UAE accuses Iran's Revolutionary Guard of piracy after two ADNOC vessels are attacked in the Strait of Hormuz

By Staff Writer  |  14 August 2026

Two vessels affiliated with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company were attacked on the evening of Thursday 13 August as they transited the strait. Nobody was hurt. The foreign ministry called the attack a flagrant violation of a Security Council resolution and demanded the waterway be reopened without conditions.

The company confirmed the attack on both vessels and said the situation had been brought under control, with no injuries. It said nothing about the ships themselves, and neither has anyone else: no name, no tonnage, no cargo and no position within the strait have been put on the record. The company asked the public to take its information from official sources and to avoid circulating unverified material, which is the sort of request that is usually made when a good deal of unverified material is already circulating.

The response from the government was considerably less measured. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned what it called a hostile Iranian attack, and said the targeting of the two ships was a flagrant violation of United Nations Security Council resolution 2817, which the ministry described as affirming the importance of freedom of navigation and rejecting the targeting of commercial vessels or the obstruction of international maritime routes.

The ministry went further than condemning a single incident. It said that using the strait as an instrument of economic coercion amounts to acts of piracy by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

What the ministry actually said

Its statement held that targeting commercial shipping, and using the Strait of Hormuz as a tool of economic coercion or blackmail, represents acts of piracy by the Revolutionary Guard Corps and a direct threat to the stability of the region, its peoples and global energy security. It called on Iran to halt the attacks and to reopen the strait completely and unconditionally.

Read carefully, that is a claim about a policy rather than about an incident. The complaint is not that a warship or a missile crew made a mistake on Thursday evening. It is that the closure of the waterway is deliberate, that it is being maintained in order to extract something, and that the party maintaining it is a named branch of the Iranian armed forces. Whether the evidence supports the attribution has not been set out publicly, and the ministry did not set it out.

The strait, six days earlier

This is the second such incident in a week. On 8 August the UAE condemned a missile attack on a carrier affiliated with the same company as it transited the strait, again with no injuries reported. Two attacks on one operator inside a week suggests either a pattern or a coincidence, and the government has plainly concluded it is the former.

Iran's public position is that the waterway is under its own control rather than closed by it. Hossein Taeb, head of the paramilitary Basij forces affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, made the point on 13 August in remarks carried by Iranian state television.

Today, you see that the Strait of Hormuz is under the management and control of the Islamic republic, and our country continues on its path in complete security

Hossein Taeb, head of the paramilitary Basij forces affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guards, 13 August 2026

That was said a day after the American president claimed total control of the same water. Both statements cannot be right, and the shipping that has to cross it is entitled to treat neither as a navigational aid. The strait has been effectively closed since the war began in February, and the United States defence secretary said this week that his forces hold enough assets to maintain a naval blockade of Iranian ports indefinitely, rotating ships in and out as required.

Why it matters beyond the Gulf

For anyone building, insuring or financing energy infrastructure, the operative fact is not who controls the strait but that the question is open and being answered by force. Charter rates, war risk premiums and delivery schedules all price uncertainty, and uncertainty of this kind does not resolve on a timetable. A closure maintained as a bargaining position ends when the bargaining ends, which is a political date rather than a commercial one.

Two ships were attacked and nobody was hurt. That is the whole of the confirmed record so far. Everything else, on both sides, is an assertion about who is in charge of the water, made by parties with a reason to be believed.