‘Iran has control of vital strait’

Iran: Iran would find it “really easy” to close the world’s most important oil transit channel, the Strait of Hormuz at the Gulf’s entrance, but would not do so right now, Iran’s navy chief said on Wednesday.

“Shutting the strait for Iran’s armed forces is really easy -- or as we say (in Iran) easier than drinking a glass of water,” Admiral Habibollah Sayari said in an interview with Iran’s Press TV.

“But today, we don’t need (to shut) the strait because we have the Sea of Oman under control, and can control the transit,” he said.

The United States warned Iran against any attempt to disrupt shipping.

“Interference with the transit... of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz will not be tolerated,” said Pentagon press secretary George Little.

Sayari was speaking a day after Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi threatened to close the strait if the West imposed more sanctions on Iran, and as its navy held war games in international waters to the east of the channel. World prices briefly climbed after Rahimi warned on Tuesday that “not a drop of oil will pass through the Strait of Hormuz” if the West broadened sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme.

“The enemies will only drop their plots when we put them back in their place,” the official news agency IRNA quoted Rahimi as saying.

More than a third of the world’s tanker-borne oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic choke point that links the Gulf -- and its petroleum-exporting states of Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- to the Indian Ocean.

The United States maintains a naval presence in the Gulf in large part to ensure that passage for oil remains free.

But Sayari asserted that the Strait of Hormuz “is completely under the control of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He said Iran’s navy was constituted with the aim of being able to close the strait if necessary. AFP