US official refutes report that Navy has resumed ‘Project Freedom’ shipping escorts in the Strait of Hormuz
After an earlier Wall Street Journal report claiming the US Navy has restarted guiding oil tankers past the Iranian coast, a US official tells i24NEWS that the project has not restarted
A US official has denied reports that the American military has resumed its 'Project Freedom' shipping escorts in the Persian Gulf, directly contradicting earlier reporting on the state of the maritime corridor.
Speaking to i24NEWS, the official dismissed a report by The Wall Street Journal that claimed the US Navy had reactivated the operation designed to guide stranded commercial vessels past the Iranian coast.
The initial report had claimed that American warships successfully shepherded a Greek-owned supertanker carrying two million barrels of crude oil out of the bottlenecked waterway.
It also suggested that Pentagon planners were preparing to run similar protective corridors for roughly a dozen high-priority commercial assets that have been marooned in the region since early March.
Originally conceived as the second phase of the conflict with Iran following the conclusion of Operation Epic Fury, "Project Freedom" was launched by the Trump administration to break a devastating maritime stalemate. The primary objective was to safely extract over 1,500 neutral commercial ships and an estimated 23,000 mariners who had been trapped inside the Persian Gulf since a sweeping Iranian blockade choked off a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil supply.
The operation lasted a mere 36 hours before grinding to an abrupt halt. While the Pentagon initially framed the pause as a temporary "mutual agreement" designed to give diplomatic backchannels and international mediation space to secure a permanent peace deal, it left hundreds of commercial vessels stranded in a volatile geopolitical limbo.