Iraq Sells Oil to Abu Dhabi for Transit Through Strait of Hormuz Amid Ongoing Conflict
Iraq’s state oil marketer SOMO has confirmed that Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is among the buyers of its crude, with cargoes exiting via the Strait of Hormuz amid ongoing regional conflict and severe disruptions to normal shipping. According to Ali Nizar, director-general of SOMO, ADNOC is one of the buyers SOMO deals with, along with other companies.
SOMO has been selling oil to whoever can load it onto ships and exit the Strait of Hormuz, offering deep discounts reportedly as much as $25–$30 per barrel below benchmark prices for August loadings of Basrah Medium and other grades. Exports have recently risen to around 2 million barrels per day, according to SOMO comments, after earlier production shut-ins when southern Iraqi fields lost access during peak disruptions.
Rise of Cloaked/Dark Tanker Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz
What was once primarily a sanctions-evasion tactic used by Iranian and Russian “shadow” or “dark” fleets has become standard operating procedure for commercial non-sanctioned tankers moving legitimate Gulf crude. Vessels disable Automatic Identification System (AIS) or operate with limited or spoofed signals during transit of the high-risk waterway, load or shuttle inside the Gulf, and only reappear after STS transfers in safer waters such as the Gulf of Oman or off Fujairah.
Maritime analytics firms report that dark activity now dominates remaining Hormuz traffic: In periods tracked since the escalation of the Iran-related conflict, 57–65%+ of outbound laden transits occurred dark, rising higher in some weeks (e.g., nearly 70% in mid-July periods and 62–79% for crude tankers in more recent samples of ~100 transits).
Global Dark-Fleet Activity Surges
Windward tracked a sharp rise in prolonged dark events in Q2 2026 (over 3,000 events involving more than 2,000 vessels), driven by both sanctions circumvention and conflict-related risk avoidance in the Middle East Gulf. The broader shadow/dark fleet (including sanctioned and high-risk tonnage) numbers in the low-to-mid thousands of vessels and moves hundreds of millions of barrels of oil monthly, which is harder to track in real time.
These cloaked movements mean official or AIS-only tallies of oil leaving the Gulf systematically miss a material portion of actual supply reaching markets—contributing to the “flying blind” characterization of current global oil market dynamics.
Original Article: Iraq Selling Oil to Abu Dhabi to Shuttle Through the Strait of Hormuz Cloaked — Energynewsbeat