In plain terms, sanctions are a wall, and for years Iran’s oil has been climbing over it with a changed passport. In the run-up to that January 2023 report, the country’s crude exports were already running at roughly 1.3 million barrels a day by November, and December sat near four-year highs on the counts of shipping-analytics firms Vortexa and Kpler, with much of the cargo heading to China. For a global market worried about sanctions squeezing Russian supply, the extra barrels were almost welcome.
Washington’s answer
The enforcement response arrived on a Thursday in July 2025, when the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated a web of firms and ships built to move Iranian crude disguised as Iraqi. At the center sits Salim Ahmed Said, an Iraqi businessman whose network blends Iranian oil into Iraqi barrels for Western buyers. The operation is believed to have generated billions of dollars, and in some cases has benefited the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, which the United States lists as a foreign terrorist organization.
Think of the machinery like a laundering route for cargo. Iranian oil is mixed with Iraqi product in storage tanks, paperwork is forged so the load reads as Iraqi, and the barrels go to market. Treasury says Said bribed Iraqi officials to fix the documents; his ships meet at sea for ship-to-ship transfers that hide where the crude was loaded.
The names on the list
The designations reach deep into that plumbing. VS Tankers, a UAE-based company in Said’s orbit, has run a fleet through those mid-sea transfers; VS Oil, which Said expanded in 2023, manages storage tanks in Iraq used for blending and has smuggled hard currency into Iran as payment. Two more vessels, the BIANCA JOYSEL under Panama’s flag and the Comoros-registered FOTIS, have carried millions of barrels of Iranian crude between them. Trans Arctic Global, which books piloting services for Iranian ships, is designated too, as is the Al-Qatirji Company, tied to worldwide sales of Iranian oil through vessels including the ELIZABET and ATILA, which moved Iranian crude relabeled as other nations’ cargo.
The legal hooks are Executive Order 13902, aimed at Iran’s petroleum and petrochemical sectors, and Executive Order 13224, covering terrorism-related activity. Treasury counts this as the eighth round of oil-trade sanctions since the maximum-pressure drive ordered by National Security Presidential Memorandum 2. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent framed the campaign in blunt terms: Iran’s “behavior has left it decimated” and, despite “every opportunity to choose peace,” its “leaders have chosen extremism,” he said, adding: “Treasury will continue to target Tehran’s revenue sources and intensify economic pressure.”
The practical upshot is mechanical: assets of the designated entities inside the United States are blocked, Americans are barred from dealing with them, and banks or foreign firms that keep working with the network risk secondary sanctions. The wall, in other words, is being raised while the forged passports keep getting caught.
Sources
- More pressure on Tehran: US sanctions Iranian oil smuggling networks | Israel National News
- Iran’s Oil Exports Are Surging and Much of the Crude Is Going to China – Bloomberg
