Risk of ‘extremely serious’ oil spill grows in Red Sea following attack

International shipping authorities are very worried about a possible environmental disaster in the Red Sea following an attack on a tanker carrying about a million barrels of crude oil.

The Greek-flagged MV Delta Sounion was attacked Aug. 21 by a vessel crewed by the Iran-aligned Houthis, a Yemeni political and military organization, according to the U.S. military. It’s currently on fire and appears to be leaking oil into Red Sea waters.

“The risk of an oil spill, posing an extremely serious environmental hazard, remains high and there is widespread concern about the damage such a spill would cause within the region,” said Arsenio Dominguez, secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), in a Wednesday statement.

Dominguez said he was “extremely concerned” about the situation.

On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder described the Sounion as “immobilized” in its location in the Red Sea. The ship’s condition presents “both a navigational hazard and a potential environmental catastrophe,” he said.

The Greek shipping ministry said the vessel was on its way from Iraq to Greece with a crew of two Russian and 23 Filipino sailors when it was attacked, according to Ryder. 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 Gaza.

Last week, Houthi spokesperson Yahya Sare’e posted a video on social media purportedly showing the Sounion being set ablaze. He described it as showing “scenes of the Yemeni Navy burning the Greek ship SOUNION in the Red Sea.”

The situation with the Sounion isn’t the first time an oil tanker has posed a grave environmental risk to the Red Sea as a result of tensions with the Houthis.

An oil tanker moored off the coast of the Hodeidah governorate in Houthi-controlled territory prompted multiple special meetings of the United Nations Security Council in 2021 and 2020. 

The leaking 45-year-old FSO Safer tanker had been serving as a floating storage facility and fell into disrepair following Saudi Arabian-led military actions against the Houthis in 2015.

U.N. Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen warned at the time that a possible spill could impact 28 million people relying on local waters and resources for their livelihoods.

The 1.1 million barrels of oil on board the Safer were eventually offloaded to another tanker in a ship-to-ship transfer that concluded in August 2023.

Despite numerous calls for a ceasefire and de-escalation of tensions around the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, a forthcoming resolution appears unlikely following a spate of assassinations and extraterritorial attacks in the region.

Hamas political bureau chair Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran in July, and deputy chair Saleh al-Arouri was killed in Lebanon in January. Fuad Shukr, a senior member of the Iran-backed Lebanese political organization Hezbollah, was the target of an “intelligence-based elimination” in July, according to the Israeli military, as reported by the BBC.

In April, an Israeli attack on an Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, killed two generals and five other officers, according to The Associated Press, in a significant escalation of the conflict that prompted Iran to launch retaliatory strikes on Israel.

The latest chapter in the decades-long regional conflict was set off by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in which the group killed more than 1,100 people and took more than 200 hostages.

Israel responded with a military campaign to eliminate Hamas, in which about 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, a figure that includes Hamas fighters but is mostly civilians.