Iran Says No One Else Can Clear Its Mines. There's One Problem: It May Not Know Where They All Are.
Point 5 of the Islamabad MOU is unambiguous: "The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the tactical and military obstacles and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days."
Iran signed that commitment on June 17. The 30-day clock expires around July 17.
Fifteen of those thirty days have now passed. And the New York Times, citing US officials, has reported something that should alarm everyone tracking this crisis: Iran is finding it increasingly difficult to fulfil its demining commitment because it cannot locate all the mines it planted. The small boats that conducted Iran's mining operations — decentralised, fast-moving, without a clear command chain — did not maintain a reliable record of where every mine was placed. Some may have drifted from their original positions on sea currents. Neither Iran nor the United States currently has a complete picture of how many mines remain or where they are.
Iran's response to this problem has been to insist that no other country may help. "According to the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, demining is carried out solely by Iran and by no other country, and we fundamentally do not permit any such thing," Deputy Foreign Minister Gharibabadi said on Monday. He was addressing France directly — warning Paris not to "complicate" a "sensitive and complex" situation with what Tehran described as "provocations."
This is the crisis within the crisis. And it is the story that will determine whether the 60-day window produces a genuine peace or another collapse.
How Iran Laid Mines Without a Map
To understand the problem, you need to understand how Iran's mining campaign was conducted.
Iran did not deploy its naval mines from large, trackable warships operating under central command authority. It used small boats — fast, difficult to detect, and operating with a degree of autonomy that made them effective in the early stages of the conflict but catastrophic for any subsequent clearance operation.
The New York Times described the process: mines were laid by small craft without a clear record of where they were placed. When IRGC naval commanders ordered the operations, the boats dispersed across the strait — some laying mines in the traffic separation scheme, some near Larak Island, some along approach corridors — and returned without filing the kind of precise positional records that a systematic clearance operation would require.
The result is a minefield without a map.
Mines are also not static. The Strait of Hormuz is subject to strong tidal flows — currents that can move a moored mine from its original position or, if its anchor line is cut or corrodes, allow it to drift entirely. Maritime officials have warned repeatedly throughout this crisis about the danger of drifting mines. A mine that was laid in Iranian-controlled waters can drift into the southern Omani corridor. A mine that was placed in a known shipping lane can drift to an unknown location. Mines that cannot be found cannot be cleared.
US strikes during the conflict destroyed a significant portion of Iran's naval infrastructure — including vessels and facilities that would have been used for systematic mine-laying and tracking. Those same strikes destroyed whatever institutional knowledge existed about the mining campaign's scope and locations.
The result, as the NYT reported, is that neither Iran nor the US currently has a clear picture of how many mines remain in the strait or where they are all deployed.
The 30-Day Deadline and Why It Is Already in Trouble
The optimistic estimate for clearing the strait's mines — even under ideal conditions with full international cooperation — is 40 to 50 days, according to analysis by TechTimes citing naval experts. That estimate assumes coordinated multinational operations using the full suite of modern mine-clearing tools: sonar-equipped underwater drones, remotely operated vehicles, mine-hunting helicopters, and dedicated minesweeping vessels.
The 30-day MOU deadline assumes Iran alone, with its own assets, under its own authority.
Iran's mine-clearing capability has been significantly degraded by US strikes during the conflict. The country does not possess a surplus of mine countermeasure vessels. And crucially — as Chatham House's analysis puts it — "clearing mines is a slow, deliberate and resource-intensive process that requires specialised vessels operating predictably in confined waters. These forces cannot work effectively unless all parties have confidence that they will not become targets."
The weekend's attacks — IRGC drones hitting the Ever Lovely and the Kiku, US retaliatory strikes on Iranian military sites, Iranian missiles on US bases in Bahrain and Kuwait — are precisely the kind of environment in which mine-clearing operations cannot safely proceed. Every day of active hostilities is a day the 30-day clock runs without meaningful demining progress.
The MOU window expires around August 17. The optimistic 40-to-50-day mine-clearance estimate — measured from when operations could realistically begin — would put clearance completion somewhere between late July and early August. That leaves virtually no buffer. The pessimistic estimate of six months would put the strait's mine hazard extending well into December 2026, long after the diplomatic window has either produced or failed to produce a comprehensive deal.
The France-Macron Dispute: Why Iran's Refusal Matters
France's offer to join Oman and other partners in clearing the strait's mines was not, as Iran characterised it, a provocation. It was a practical response to a genuine operational problem.
France has mine-clearing capability. It has the Charles de Gaulle carrier strike group in the region, which includes assets that can support mine countermeasure operations. It has been planning for exactly this mission since the Northwood conference in April. Germany has dispatched a minesweeper — the Fulda — from Kiel, and UK, Italian, Japanese and Canadian assets have been identified for the coalition mine-clearing force.
Macron's proposal was simple: the strait needs to be cleared, Iran has demonstrated it cannot do it alone within the timeframe the MOU requires, and international assets are available and ready. France and Oman would lead, with partners coordinating.
Iran's rejection was equally simple: no. The MOU gives Iran sole demining authority. No foreign vessel may conduct operations in Iran's waters. Any attempt to do so will be treated as a hostile act.
The practical consequence of Iran's position is stark. If Iran refuses international assistance and cannot clear the mines itself within 30 days — which is now looking highly probable — the traffic separation scheme remains hazardous, insurance premiums remain at 10 to 40 times their pre-war levels, and the strait remains operationally dangerous regardless of what the diplomatic track produces.
As Chatham House put it: "Mine clearance is often considered a technical challenge, but in the Strait of Hormuz the greater obstacle may be political."
What the MOU Actually Says — and the Loophole Iran Is Using
Iran's legal position on sole demining authority rests on Point 5 of the MOU — which does, on a straightforward reading, assign the responsibility to Iran.
But there is a tension within Point 5 that Iran has chosen to resolve in its own favour. The MOU states that commercial vessel traffic "will immediately start" — implying the strait is being opened now, not after mines are cleared. The demining commitment is framed as a parallel obligation that runs alongside the reopening, not a precondition for it. In other words, the MOU was designed to open the strait immediately while demining proceeds — with Iran responsible for that process within 30 days.
Iran's interpretation has been to use the demining authority as a lever: you can transit only via Iranian-approved routes, because only Iran knows which areas are safe, and only Iran may certify any route as mine-free. The southern Omani corridor — the route that the US Navy, IMO, and Oman have been using to move ships without going through Iranian-controlled waters — falls outside Iran's approved routes and therefore, in Tehran's view, cannot be guaranteed safe.
This is not an unreasonable legal position. It is, however, a geopolitically maximalist one — one that uses the demining responsibility as a tool to reassert control over the waterway rather than as an obligation to be fulfilled.
The Collision Course: Diplomacy and Physics
The 60-day MOU window and the mine-clearing timeline are on a collision course, as TechTimes' analysis identified. The diplomatic deadline — August 17 — arrives before a comprehensive mine sweep can realistically be completed even under optimistic projections.
That creates a scenario that nobody in the current negotiations has fully addressed publicly: what happens if, on August 17, the nuclear talks have failed to produce a comprehensive agreement but mine-clearing operations are still ongoing? Does the MOU framework extend? Does Iran use the incomplete demining as leverage to demand extension on its own terms? Does the US resume the blockade?
The mine problem is not a technical annex to the main story. It is the main story. A deal that reopens the strait on paper but leaves 80-plus mines on the seafloor — in unknown positions, clearing at the pace of a degraded Iranian naval force operating without international assistance — has not actually opened the strait. It has created the conditions for the next incident.
Every ship that transits the southern corridor does so in water that has not been comprehensively swept. Every insurer who writes war risk cover for that transit is pricing a hazard that cannot be fully quantified because the minefield has no complete map.
What Needs to Happen
Chatham House's analysis offers the clearest roadmap: mine clearance should be treated as a confidence-building measure within the negotiations, not a separate technical problem. Iran's participation in the process — even if it leads the operation — should be structured to allow international verification and transparency. The 30-day deadline should be acknowledged as unrealistic and replaced with a monitored, verifiable timeline that both sides can accept.
Most importantly, the ceasefire needs to actually hold for mine-clearing operations to proceed safely. The weekend's exchange of strikes — IRGC drones, US retaliatory strikes, Iranian missiles on Bahrain and Kuwait — is precisely the environment in which minesweeping vessels cannot safely operate. Every escalation costs days from a timeline that is already impossibly tight.
Iran holds most of the leverage here. It has sole demining authority under the MOU. It controls the northern route. It has rejected international assistance. For that leverage to produce a safe, genuinely open strait rather than a permanently contested one, Tehran's leadership needs to make a decision that the IRGC hardliner faction has consistently resisted: treat the demining commitment as a genuine obligation rather than a tool of geopolitical control.
Whether they will is, like so much in this crisis, still unclear.
The Bottom Line
Fifteen days into a 30-day demining deadline, Iran cannot locate all its own mines, will not accept international help, and has spent the past week attacking ships in the waterway it is supposed to be clearing.
The diplomatic timeline and the physical safety timeline are colliding. The 60-day window expires before a comprehensive mine sweep can realistically be completed. And the question of who controls the Strait of Hormuz — which has been the unanswered question at the heart of this crisis since February 28 — is nowhere more literally at stake than in the question of who clears the mines.
A minefield without a map, in a waterway that carries 20% of the world's oil, under the management of a country that says no one else may help.
That is where the Strait of Hormuz stands today.
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