Iranian Official Describes Months of Nightly Strikes on Hormuz Smuggling Vessels

An Iranian security official has said that forces under Tehran’s command have struck five vessels every night for several months in the Strait of Hormuz, targeting what he described as smugglers. The claim, carried by the Russian-language service of the state-run broadcaster ParsToday, is the most explicit public description yet of a sustained maritime campaign in one of the world’s most consequential shipping lanes, and it has so far come from a single outlet with no independent confirmation ^[1].

The ParsToday post attributes the statement to Rezaei, describing him as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. Public records list Ali Larijani as the council’s secretary, and the post’s wording does not reconcile the two titles. Whoever spoke, the content is significant: a government official publicly acknowledging a standing, nightly operation rather than isolated incidents. The post offered no vessel names, flag states, dates, or casualty figures, and no shipping tracker or Western government has corroborated the account. Reports of this kind should be treated as Iranian official messaging until other evidence emerges.

The framing matters. Calling the targets smugglers places the operation within Iran’s long-running enforcement against the informal trade that sanctions have pushed into the Gulf. Iran’s oil exports have depended on ship-to-ship transfers and a shadow fleet, and fuel and goods smuggling has become a livelihood for coastal communities that have little else. A campaign against those networks can be presented as law enforcement. It can also be a means of policing commercial traffic that Tehran cannot otherwise control, and the distinction is not one the statement attempts to draw. Western shipping interests have long worried that the Strait’s freedom of navigation is the first casualty of any escalation, and an openly declared nightly strike program would raise those concerns sharply if independently verified.

The announcement also landed on a day of mixed signals from Tehran. Iran’s security chief has called the latest US response to proposed deal conditions inadequate ^[2]. In the same hours, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi telephoned his Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, to discuss regional escalation and offered Iranian help in starting talks between Riyadh and the Houthis, according to the Saudi ministry as relayed by local outlets ^[3]. Meanwhile the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Western civilization would suffer a humiliating defeat in its confrontation with Iran, invoking the Bay of Pigs ^[4].

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has followed Iran’s factional politics. The foreign ministry under Pezeshkian’s government is pursuing channels to Riyadh and Washington. The security establishment is publicizing coercive action at sea and maritime enforcement as proof that Tehran retains leverage over shipping. Hardline rhetoric and diplomatic outreach are not necessarily contradictory; they can be a deliberate division of labor, with the threat of disruption in Hormuz serving as the stick that gives the diplomatic offer weight. The problem for Tehran is that the public version of the stick is now more visible than the carrot.

For ordinary Iranians, the economic stakes are concrete. Smuggling routes that the state now describes as criminal are also the routes through which fuel and consumer goods reach families priced out by a sinking rial. Any campaign that disrupts those routes without offering alternatives lands hardest on coastal and border communities, the same populations that have protested economic conditions in recent years.

What this tells us about the regime’s stability calculus is that Tehran is willing to make its maritime enforcement and its economic desperation visible at the same time, betting that a demonstrated capacity to threaten the Strait will buy more than the domestic and international costs of admitting it.