Iranian FM Araghchi says "We have opened dedicated routes for ships carrying Iraqi oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz in order to reduce Iraq’s losses"

Iranian FM Araghchi says "We have opened dedicated routes for ships carrying Iraqi oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz in order to reduce Iraq’s losses"

Preferential passage arrangements through the Strait of Hormuz are a recurring feature of episodes in which Iranian leverage over the waterway is being exercised selectively rather than as a full closure: Tehran has historically distinguished between traffic it permits and traffic it obstructs, and carve-outs for a neighbour's crude signal calibrated pressure rather than escalation to interdiction. The mechanism that matters is freight, insurance and the risk premium rather than the physical volume itself, since war-risk cover and tanker willingness to transit have in past disruptions repriced prompt crude spreads well ahead of any actual shortfall. Iraq is a special case worth naming: its exports run overwhelmingly by sea and it lacks the pipeline bypass capacity that Gulf peers have used in prior chokepoint episodes, so an explicit Iranian accommodation substitutes for infrastructure Baghdad does not have. The follow-ons are whether the arrangement holds for non-Iraqi cargoes, how underwriters treat transit risk under a permission-based regime, and any parallel signalling from other Gulf producers or from naval presences in the strait. As a de-escalatory carve-out within a coercive posture, the read is that the chokepoint remains the instrument, not the act.