Oil tanker struck in Hormuz: Iran

TEHRAN, Sept 18: Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Friday they struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, according to state news agency IRNA, as a British maritime agency also reported an attack.

Iran has maintained its stranglehold on the strategic strait as Washington continues pressing its counterblockade of Iranian ports during the Middle East war.

The Islamic republic wants to charge ships for passage, attacking vessels it accuses of attempting to circumvent its preferred route.

"The Togo-flagged oil tanker 'Trend' had been targeted and detained after a fire broke out on board" late on Thursday, the statement said, calling it an attempted "illegal passage".

Early on Friday, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) said a ship was hit by an "unknown projectile", causing a fire that was extinguished.

The monitoring agency had also reported a "security incident" in Hormuz late on Thursday, without giving details.

It was unclear if the IRGC and UKMTO reports referred to the same incident.

When the war on Iran began seven months ago, Washington area Iranian-American Soroush quickly found himself losing friends.

He hates the Islamic government in Tehran but believes "nothing is going to be better" by going to war.

Fellow exiles in the United States began accusing him of supporting their oppressors.

Another Iranian-American, Bahar, also found herself being cut off within the diaspora -- but in her case because she strongly supported the war launched by US President Donald Trump.

The 750,000-strong Iranian community in the US is overwhelmingly united in opposing Iran's Islamic regime whose top leadership has been decimated by the US-Israeli offensive that has destroyed swaths of the country's military and prompted global economic shocks.

But deep fault lines have appeared among expatriates and exiles over whether the war will succeed in ending 47 years of clerical rule in their homeland.

"Family relationships have been strained or broken...Even lifelong friendships have ended over this," said Sahar Razavi, director of the Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies Center at California State University, Sacramento, who says the war exacerbated pre-existing tensions.

AFP spoke to Iranian community members around Washington about the tensions. Some requested their full names be withheld as they talked about their own friends and relatives.

Soroush, a 3D artist and animator who came to the US a decade ago, described rifts with close friends and even his own brother and sister-in-law after the war started on February 28.�" AFP