Mali, of all places… The regime squatting on Iran needed flags for its oil tankers, and somebody was happy to sell them flags from countries with no coastline. On November 4, Treasury sanctioned an India-based network it says built websites for flagging registries nobody authorized, posing as the maritime authorities of Aruba, Guyana, Mali, Mozambique, Malawi, Sint Maarten, Timor-Leste, Nicaragua and Laos.
I had to check a map. Mali, Malawi and Laos are all landlocked, and so is Eswatini, whose name went on a Singapore-based registry in 2023. Eswatini publicly disavowed it, and Treasury says it kept selling flags anyway. In April the Department of War seized a tanker carrying the regime’s oil under a fake Guyana flag. Who looks at a Malawi flag on a crude tanker and nods?
I grew up on BBSes, where every third sysop ran the official something from his bedroom with a phone line and a big ASCII logo. This is the same trick with a domain name, and Al Jazeera reports Treasury saying the vessels it kept afloat include ones working for the regime’s forces and allied groups.
Ryan Costello of the National Iranian American Council has a real case against the whole pressure campaign. When the rial hit a record 2.02 million to the dollar in August, he told TIME: “This currency depreciation has a real cost for ordinary Iranians, making their life ever more unaffordable.” Squeeze a country and the people buying bread pay before any general does. That’s true of most sanctions, and still, I don’t see who in Tabriz eats because a tanker flies a fake flag from Laos. My bet is the money from that oil goes wherever the regime sends it, and it doesn’t send it to Tabriz.
Bessent, on social media:
“We know where you are, and we will sanction those who continue supporting the Iranian regime, whether by land, sea, or air,” [or by a sea in Mali]
I’ll admit I laughed at that one, which is more than I usually do at a Treasury Secretary.
The fake-registry racket is a FAIL, and so is the occupying force that needed it. I don’t think anybody shipping honest oil goes shopping for a flag from a country that has to borrow somebody else’s ocean.