1980–1988
The Gulf tanker war
Iran and Iraq attacked shipping 451 times between them. Belgium sent minehunters, and the Belgian tanker Naess Leopard was hit herself by two Iranian rockets.
All conflicts › The Gulf tanker war
In the database
In the tanker war of 1981-88 Iraq made 283 attacks on shipping and Iran 168. By the end of 1987 those attacks had killed 116 merchant sailors, with 37 missing and 167 wounded, and had damaged more than thirty million tons of cargo between 1981 and 1987.
Belgium's documented contribution was mine countermeasures. After the reflagged tanker Bridgeton struck a mine on 24 July 1987, Belgium sent Tripartite-class minehunters and the command and support ship Zinnia (A961) to the Gulf in Operation Octopus (1987-88), part of the multinational Western European Union effort. The Belgian units included the minehunter Bovesse (M909). But Belgium was not present there only in grey-painted ships.
The Naess Leopard, 18 August 1985
On Sunday 18 August 1985, at 10.05 local time and some seventy miles north-east of Doha, the Belgian oil tanker Naess Leopard of 45,700 tons was struck by two rockets from Iranian aircraft. The crew's quarters caught fire. Lloyd's of London reported the attack; the news agency UPI carried it and summed it up again a week later: an Iranian jet had attacked the tanker “in apparent retaliation” for the Iraqi air raid on Kharg Island of 15 August, in which eight half-tonne bombs fell on Iran's largest oil terminal.
She is therefore the one Belgian ship that appears in the tallies of the tanker war. Anthony Cordesman's study for the Center for Strategic and International Studies counts the targets by flag in two separate tables, compiled from data of the Washington Post, the Center for Defense Information and the US Navy. Among those flags stands Belgium: one ship, attacked by Iran, in 1985. Figure and event coincide.
And the tugs
Belgian towage worked in the Gulf in those years. The Ferdinand Verbiest, for one, a 298-ton ocean tug launched in 1985 at Jonker & Stans of Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht and sailing under the Belgian flag for the Schelde Sleepvaart Bedrijf of Antwerp. What exactly befell the Belgian tugs in the Gulf we have not yet been able to establish from a source – and salvage work on stricken tankers was lethal: when the Spanish supertanker Barcelona, hit three days earlier by Iraqi aircraft, blew up after all on 16 May 1988 with salvors alongside, nine of the crew of the Norwegian salvage tug Scan Partner were lost. This section is under research. Anyone who knows something of it is welcome to say so.
The vessels known by name
- M/T Naess Leopard · Tanker18 August 1985 · hit by two rockets from Iranian aircraft; the crew accommodation caught fire · Iraanse luchtmachtLloyd's of London, gemeld door UPI 18 en 25 augustus 1985; Cordesman (CSIS), Lessons of Modern War II, figuur 9.7
Where to find more
Belgian Navy veterans' associations (Operation Octopus); wielingen1991.org; USNI Proceedings and Naval History; Martin Navias and E.R. Hooton, Tanker Wars (I.B. Tauris).