The United States will begin this Monday since they have been trapped in the Strait of Hormuz due to the beginning of the war, according to Donald Trump, who has described this operation as a “humanitarian gesture.” The Central Command, responsible for US military forces in the Persian Gulf, has declared for its part that the measure, called Project Freedom (“Project Freedom”), seeks to defend freedom in international waters.
In a message on his social network, Truth, the president has specified that the initiative by which the United States will guide these “neutral and innocent” ships so that they can leave restricted waters will benefit “countries around the world, almost all of which are not involved in the current dispute in the Middle East.” Experts estimate that nearly a thousand merchant ships, with a total of about 20,000 crew members, are trapped in those waters.
“For the good of Iran, the Middle East and the United States, we have told those countries that we will guide their ships to get them safely out of that restricted sea lane, so that they can freely continue with their tasks. I repeat: they are ships from places in the world that are not involved in any way in what is happening in the Middle East,” said the president, who does not mention any precise nationality in his text. Trump has not offered precise details about the nature of the operation, although he has warned that the United States will respond “strongly” against any attempt to prevent it from developing smoothly.
The initiative, he insists, tries to help the ships and crews “trapped” in the strait and who are beginning to exhaust their food and other basic products while they wait for the conflict to be resolved and circulation to resume through that maritime bottleneck, through which 20% of the world’s oil and gas circulated before the war.
The operation will have military and diplomatic components, according to the Central Command in a statement. The State Department and the Pentagon had already announced last week an initiative to form a coalition to coordinate and exchange information to reinforce security in the strait and reopen it. France and the United Kingdom also plan to lead a multilateral mission to ensure free movement once hostilities have completely ceased, although Trump has referred to that initiative with disdain on more than one occasion. The US initiative, Building Maritime Freedom, “seeks to combine diplomatic action with military coordination, which will be essential during Project Freedom,” explains the Command.
The Pentagon will contribute to the US mission to guide merchant ships “destroyers equipped with guided missiles, more than a hundred air and ground aircraft, multi-domain unmanned platforms and 15,000 soldiers,” lists the Central Command statement, distributed on social networks. “Our support for this defensive mission is essential for regional security and for the global economy while we maintain the naval blockade” of Iranian ports, said Admiral Brad Cooper, head of Central Command.
Despite the ceasefire agreed between the two adversaries and in force since April 8, Iran maintains its blockade of the strait. In retaliation, and as an attempt to pressure Tehran to give in and come to the negotiating table, the United States has also imposed its own closure on the passage of ships sailing from Iranian ports.
Trump also indicates in his message this Sunday that his representatives are maintaining “very positive negotiations” with Iran, and those conversations “could lead to something very positive.” His announcement about the new operation to guide merchant ships comes when Iran has presented a new peace proposal, the third and fourteen points, through Pakistani mediators.
The US president had declared on Saturday that he would examine the proposal but would probably reject it because Tehran “has not yet paid a high enough price.” Iran announced this Sunday that it had received Washington’s response to its new plan. Upon his arrival in Washington after spending the weekend in Florida, the president did not provide any further details, and limited himself to pointing out that the situation “is going very well.”
