It has been a year since the Red Sea "shipping" situation began.
On Tuesday morning, December 12, 2023, a tanker sailing under the Norwegian flag was hit by an anti-ship missile fired by Houthi rebels off the coast of the Red Sea. The ship named Strinda had departed from Malaysia days earlier and was heading towards the Suez Canal. The USS Mason, a guided-missile destroyer, was the first to respond to the distress signal sent by the ship and immediately headed towards the attacked vessel to provide military assistance and prevent potential further attacks. This was the second time in two weeks that the USS Mason was involved in a situation where missiles were launched from Yemen. On November 27, two ballistic missiles fired from Yemen splashed down in the Red Sea near the USS Mason (DDG-87). At that time, the warship was just completing a mission responding to a distress call from the commercial vessel M/V Central Park, which an armed group had attempted to approach and attack.
The attack on Strinda was the first attack in which the ship itself was hit, followed by further attacks in which ships of several shipping companies were damaged. As a result, shipping companies decided not to use the Suez Canal route until further notice. As an alternative, ships have to sail around Africa. The situation has not changed to this day.
The targets of the attacks were randomly selected ships, regardless of the cargo carried. Their aim was clear and unambiguous: destruction, devastation, and possibly taking innocent lives...
Yet in January 2023, we might have all thought that everything would return to normal, as after the long Covid period, we could work with plannable sailings and favorable freight rates again. But the joy couldn't last long, and we once again faced high and unpredictably fluctuating freight rates, unpredictable ship departures, longer transit times due to circumnavigating the African continent, ship delays, port congestions resulting from unpredictable shipping, and the resulting obstacles in cargo handling.
As professionals, handling such situations is a real challenge, and we love challenges... but it would be better and we would be happier if we could devote our knowledge and capacity to a much greater extent to constructive and creative activities, rather than spending most of our time and energy constantly counterbalancing a given and not very joyful situation.
In recent months, the situation in the Red Sea has further deteriorated, and sailors are terrified of even more daring pirates than before. During the autumn months, several oil tankers were hit, and the sight of burning tankers drifting crewless at sea was not uncommon. The Greek-owned oil tanker named MV Sounion - carrying one million barrels of crude oil - was attacked by the Yemeni Houthi movement on August 21. The crew abandoned the troubled vessel, after which the pirates stole explosives from the deck, resulting in fires breaking out in several places. The Iranian-backed Houthis have been attacking commercial ships in the area even more intensively since November, which they claim to do in support of the Palestinians. The group's leader called the action against Sounion "brave and daring".
The attacks also threaten a serious ecological disaster due to oil leaking from damaged oil tankers stranded in the Red Sea. The attack on MV Sounion was one of the most severe among the Houthi actions so far and could have catastrophic consequences in every respect due to the ship's cargo. Therefore, it's not surprising that the Houthis' current attack has been condemned from several quarters, with real fear of the consequences possibly hidden between the words in these gestures. The Houthis have made it clear that they are ready to sacrifice the entire fishing industry and ecosystem in the region, on which the livelihoods of Yemenis and members of other communities depend. In the Exxon Valdez disaster, considered perhaps the most famous oil spill in history, about 350,000 barrels of the 1.2 million barrels transported spilled into the sea, causing enormous immediate and decades-long destruction. Allied forces present in the Red Sea region have not yet found a way to stabilize the situation in the area, which could lead to further weakening of global and regional trade, while endangering the lives of innocent civilian sailors, while the destruction of ecosystems also poses a risk to the Houthis.
