Attack on oil tanker in Red Sea threatens ‘severe ecological disaster’

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Parts of the Red Sea face the risk of a “severe ecological disaster”, an international naval force has warned after Yemen’s Houthis apparently deliberately blew up an oil tanker laden with 150,000 tonnes of crude oil.

The EU’s Aspides task force gave the warning on Saturday after the Houthis on Friday posted a video of what they said was an explosion on the 274-metre long ship set off by its fighters. The task force is made up of members from the bloc working to combat the threat from Iran-backed Houthis to international shipping.

The Sounion’s crew were rescued from the vessel on Thursday by a French naval vessel operating as part of Aspides. The ship had been left drifting after a series of attacks by the Houthis the previous day, 77 nautical miles west of the port of Hodeidah.

The blowing up of the ship marks a new tactic for the Houthis. Since the group began its campaign against international shipping last November, it has sunk two ships — the Rubymar, attacked in February, and the Tutor, struck in June. However, it has not previously deliberately blown up an abandoned ship.

The Aspides statement, posted on X, said there was no fire visible on the ship when its forces rescued the crew. The naval force did not acknowledge the Houthis’ claim to have blown up the ship.

But it said: “On August 23, the vessel was on fire as the result of an attack by an unknown source, posing a significant environmental threat due to the large volume of crude oil on board, which could lead to a severe ecological disaster with potentially devastating effects on the region’s biodiversity.”

The statement gave no assessment of how much ecological damage had already been caused.

But it concluded: “This situation underlines that these kinds of attacks pose not only a threat against the freedom of navigation but also to the lives of seafarers, the environment, and subsequently the life of all citizens living in that region.”

US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement on Saturday: “The Houthis have made clear they are willing to destroy the fishing industry and regional ecosystems that Yemenis and other communities in the region rely on for their livelihoods.”

“The Houthis’ continued attacks threaten to spill a million barrels of oil into the Red Sea, an amount four times the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster,” Miller said.

The video posted on a Houthi X account on Friday evening showed huge explosions ripping through a vessel bearing the words “Delta Tankers”, the name of Sounion’s Greece-based owners.

The Houthis’ spokesman, Yahya Sare’e, posted the footage with words describing it as showing the Yemeni Navy — the name the group gives to its own naval forces — burning the Sounion. The post said its owners had violated the Houthis’ bans on using ports in “occupied Palestine”, as they call Israel.

The Houthis have portrayed their campaign as an effort to support Palestinians in Gaza following Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7. The hundreds of attacks on commercial ships have prompted many international shipping groups to reroute vessels away from the strategic route through the Red Sea and Suez Canal linking the Middle East and Asia with the Mediterranean and Europe.

The Sounion’s 150,000-tonne cargo would be around the full capacity of a vessel of its type — about 1mn barrels.

A communications agency representing Delta Tankers reiterated the company’s previous insistence that it was seeking to salvage the ship.

“Delta Tankers is doing everything it can to move the vessel and cargo,” the agency said, after publication of the Houthis’ video.

It had previously insisted the Sounion suffered only “minor damage” in a series of missile strikes on Wednesday.

It was the Houthis’ first successful attack on a commercial ship since it struck the Tutor on June 12, which killed a mariner as well as sinking the ship.

The sinkings of the Rubymar and the Tutor posed less environmental threat because they were carrying dry bulk cargoes, rather than environmentally damaging oil.