Experts say covert transfers at sea are used to obscure the origins of oil that left Iranian ports and the Gulf of Oman before the blockade was imposed.
Satellite images captured near the Riau Archipelago since the U.S. blockade against Iranian exports began show nine tankers offloading Iranian oil in ship-to-ship transfers. (European Space Agency, Planet Labs)
Since the U.S. blockadein the Gulf of Omanbeganlast month, at least 13 tankers have offloaded Iranian oil in covert ship-to-ship transfers thousands of miles away, near a cluster of small islands in Indonesia known as the Riau Archipelago, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery and ship-tracking data.