The United States Navy has not restarted its Persian Gulf shipping escort programme, according to an official that spoke to i24NEWS, directly contradicting a Wall Street Journal report that American warships had guided a Greek-owned supertanker carrying two million barrels of crude oil out of the waterway under a revived Project Freedom.
The Journal had reported that the Trump administration relaunched the operation and that Pentagon planners were preparing to run similar protective corridors for roughly a dozen commercial vessels stranded in the region since early March.
The official denial puts Washington at odds with that account and heaps fresh uncertainty onto an already volatile maritime situation. The Wall Street Journal for their part has since updated the story, indicating that a spokesman had said that Project Freedom was in fact not restarting. However, the Navy instead will be assisting a dozen vessels with crossings the straight over the next several days, just not under the ‘Project Freedom’ banner.
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Project Freedom was the Trump administration’s answer to a blockade that had choked off roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil supply. Its stated mission was to safely extract more than 1,500 neutral commercial ships and an estimated 23,000 mariners trapped inside the Persian Gulf — the second phase of US operations in the region after the conclusion of Operation Epic Fury. It lasted 36 hours.
The Pentagon framed the halt as an arrangement intended to give diplomatic backchannels and international mediation room to broker a lasting settlement. However, it has since failed to officially resume.
That framing did little for the ships left behind. Hundreds of commercial vessels remained stranded once the corridors went dark, caught between an unresolved blockade and stalled diplomacy. Saudi Arabia’s reported denial of US access to its airspace for Project Freedom operations had already narrowed Washington’s options before the pause took hold.
With the official denial now on record and no confirmed timeline for a diplomatic resolution, more than 23,000 mariners remain locked inside one of the world’s most critical oil-transit chokepoints.
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