The U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted all 27 of Iran's remaining commercial passenger airlines on Tuesday, alongside nine foreign cargo and sales agents spread across Turkey, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and the United Arab Emirates, in the latest expansion of a sanctions campaign now running alongside open military strikes on Iranian oil tankers. The move came just days after U.S. forces permanently disabled two Iranian crude carriers and badly damaged a third near the Persian Gulf, and hours before Iran's Revolutionary Guard Navy warned commercial tanker crews near Kuwait and Bahrain to abandon their vessels immediately.
The airline sanctions were part of a batch of 36 total targets designated under what Treasury officials are calling Operation Economic Outcast, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Officials said Mahan Air had recently managed to acquire three Boeing 777 aircraft by routing the transactions through the UAE and Oman, while the new designations target facilitators in Iran's aviation network. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent first unveiled the broader operation on August 24, describing it as an “economic D-Day” meant to hit five core Iranian sectors at once: digital assets, technology, gold, aviation and maritime shipping.
Strikes On Tankers Follow Missile Fire At U.S. Warships
The sanctions news landed just three days after U.S. Central Command confirmed a far more kinetic response to Iranian aggression. According to the Tampa Free Press, additional U.S. strikes on Iranian oil tankers took place Tuesday, September 8. A September 5 report said the United States struck three Iranian oil tankers after Iranian forces attempted missile attacks on an American navy warship, firing two ballistic missiles at a U.S. aircraft carrier and a guided-missile destroyer. CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper said U.S. forces permanently disabled two Iranian crude carriers and heavily damaged an unladen third tanker in response, according to the Associated Press.
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, told the wire service the strikes targeted vessels CENTCOM has linked to a multibillion-dollar shadow network financing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its regional proxies. Washington has separately warned it would destroy Iran's limited and exposed oil fleet if necessary, per the Tampa Free Press report, which first carried word of the strikes. Brent crude climbed to $99.46 per barrel amid the escalation, the outlet noted, with the price surge landing squarely ahead of the upcoming U.S. midterm elections.
Tehran Threatens Ships Near Kuwait And Bahrain
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Navy escalated its threats on Tuesday, telling commercial tanker crews near ports in Kuwait and Bahrain to abandon their ships immediately and warning that vessels would be targeted whether anchored or docked, according to the Associated Press. Iranian state television reported that the Revolutionary Guard has accused Kuwait and Bahrain of assisting U.S. operations by hosting American military forces, per the same broadcaster's account carried in the Tampa Free Press report. Tehran has said it plans to establish an exclusion zone near the Strait of Hormuz that would regulate transiting vessels and force ships onto an alternate route under its direction.
The dispute over who controls passage through the strait is not simply a matter of firepower. Neither the United States nor Iran has ratified the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which has left the two countries with fundamentally competing legal claims, according to Lawfare. Washington asserts a customary right to transit passage through Hormuz, while Tehran maintains the waterway falls under its own territorial sea regulations, which only allow for restricted innocent passage — a position rooted in a 1993 Iranian maritime law that does not recognize international transit rights through the strait.
Oil Flows Have Been Hammered, Then Partly Restored
The economic stakes of the standoff are enormous. U.S. Energy Information Administration data released in May showed crude oil and petroleum product flows through the Strait of Hormuz fell nearly 30% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, dropping to 14.6 million barrels per day from 20.4 million barrels per day during the same period in 2025 — a stretch when normal pre-conflict flows through Hormuz accounted for roughly 20% of global petroleum consumption, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Sunday that naval escort operations have helped restore active tanker traffic through the strait to more than 9 million barrels per day, with bypass pipelines pushing total regional exports back up to roughly two-thirds of pre-conflict levels, according to Iran International. Washington has leaned on naval convoys off the coast of Oman to escort select commercial ships along a designated transit route and keep energy flows moving despite the fighting. Bessent added Sunday that Iran now has only about 30 million barrels of unsold crude left that hasn't already gone to China, predicting that U.S. blockades and sanctions will soon choke off whatever exports remain — a forecast that would strike directly at Tehran's main remaining foreign energy buyer.
According to the Energy Information Administration, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have operational crude pipelines that could potentially re-route flows to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, while Iran's Goreh-Jask pipeline offers an alternative route with effective capacity of about 300,000 barrels per day, although Iranian loadings had stopped after September 2024.
U.S. Bases In The Gulf Absorb The Fallout
The six-month conflict has also reshaped America's military footprint in the region. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle acknowledged that the U.S. Navy will not soon return to facilities at NSA Bahrain.
The war traces back to February 28, when joint U.S.-Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader and senior military leadership, touching off six months of escalating maritime interdictions, drone warfare and commercial shipping disruptions, the Associated Press reported. A brief ceasefire push and a temporary memorandum of understanding in June failed to produce any lasting resolution. Hoodline previously reported on the initial tanker strikes near Kharg Island and on Treasury's related sanctions against a Turkish bank accused of laundering Iranian oil money into gold.
