Brent Nears $110 as Iran Claims New Hormuz Attacks, Houthis Claim Strikes on Aramco Sites
Iran’s military said it shot down a second US MQ-9 Reaper drone and struck two more tankers in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, while Houthi forces separately claimed fires at Saudi Aramco’s Yanbu export hub and its giant Shaybah oilfield — an escalation that pushed Brent crude back toward $110 a barrel, its highest level in five months.
Iran says it downed a drone and hit two more tankers
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy said Tuesday morning it had destroyed another US MQ-9 Reaper drone and attacked two additional tankers transiting the strait, according to Iranian state media relayed by CBS News and AFP. The IRGC separately said a supertanker hit a naval mine south of Hormuz and caught fire; Iranian officers said the vessel had switched off its tracking systems and was attempting to leave through what Tehran considers an unauthorized southern route.
None of the claims has been independently verified. The Pentagon has not confirmed the loss of a drone, and US officials, including President Trump, have repeatedly said the strait has already been cleared of mines — a claim that conflicts directly with Tuesday’s mine-strike report. Reuters said it could not confirm the tanker attacks or the mine incident on its own.
Houthis claim fires at Yanbu and Shaybah
Hours later, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the group had struck Aramco’s Yanbu facility on the Red Sea and the Shaybah oilfield deep in the Rub’ al-Khali desert, claiming fires broke out at both sites. Saudi authorities had not confirmed either claim at the time of writing, and energy-intelligence outlet Energy News Beat labeled both strikes unconfirmed. Newsquawk analysts noted that Shaybah sits far inland near the UAE border, so a strike there — if it occurred — would signal expanded Houthi reach rather than an imminent loss of output.
Shaybah is one of Aramco’s largest desert developments, built up over two decades to a sustained crude capacity of roughly 1 million barrels a day alongside a natural-gas-liquids plant designed to strip out more than 200,000 b/d of NGLs, according to Aramco’s own disclosures from its last publicly documented expansion. It has not previously been named in Houthi target claims during the current conflict.
A second hit on the route Saudi Arabia just restored
Yanbu carries more immediate risk, because Aramco is still rebuilding throughput there after an earlier attack on the same corridor. Drone and missile strikes in mid-September damaged pumping stations on the roughly 1,200-kilometre East-West Pipeline that carries crude from Abqaiq to Yanbu’s Red Sea terminals, forcing a full shutdown; Aramco restarted the line and resumed Red Sea crude loadings only in the final days of September, as The Daily Energy reported at the time. The pipeline, Saudi Arabia’s main bypass for the Hormuz blockade, has an emergency pumping capacity of about 7 million b/d, well above its original 5-million-b/d design, after capacity upgrades following 2019 drone strikes on Abqaiq.
A fresh, confirmed strike on Yanbu would therefore threaten not a side route but the kingdom’s primary alternative to the closed strait. Aramco has not commented publicly on Tuesday’s claims.
Araghchi digs in as Pakistan talks collapse
The claims landed as diplomacy stalled further. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tuesday that the Strait of Hormuz would remain shut until Washington accepts Tehran’s seven-day reopening framework, and that Iran had rejected US-backed talks hosted in Pakistan, setting out seven conditions of its own. Washington rejected an earlier version of the same Iranian proposal in late September, as The Daily Energy has reported, and the two sides have made no public progress since.
Brent nears a five-month high
Oil traders treated Tuesday’s claims as the latest data point in a months-long supply squeeze rather than a single shock. Brent traded near $110 a barrel on Tuesday and Wednesday, within sight of the roughly five-month peak reached earlier in October, as the market continued to price in the combined effect of the Hormuz closure, repeated tanker attacks and intermittent strikes on Saudi infrastructure. OPEC+ has approved a series of quota increases since the strait closed this spring, but members’ actual combined output has fallen well short of target as the group’s Gulf producers remain unable to move crude through Hormuz at pre-war rates, leaving the increases largely symbolic. Aramco’s own chief executive warned this month that the global supply cushion has grown “scarily thin.”
Tuesday’s episode fits a now-familiar pattern: an Iranian or Houthi claim of a new strike, no independent confirmation within the first news cycle, and a price response driven as much by accumulated risk as by any single, verified event. Saudi Arabia intercepted a wave of Houthi missiles aimed at Riyadh as recently as last week, in what was described as the kingdom’s deadliest attack in over a decade.
Sources
- CBS News / AFP, live updates on the Iran-US-Israel conflict, 20–21 October 2026 — IRGC claims on the MQ-9 drone, tanker attacks and naval mine strike.
- Newsquawk, “Houthis claim six attacks on Saudi Arabia in 48 hours,” 20 October 2026 — Houthi claims on Yanbu and Shaybah; unconfirmed status.
- Energy News Beat, “Brent Hits a Five-Month High on Gulf Attacks,” 20 October 2026 — market reaction and sourcing caveats.
- Gulf News, “Middle East War: Iran rejects US terms as tanker explodes near Hormuz,” 20–21 October 2026 — Araghchi statement on the seven-day framework and Pakistan talks.
- CNBC, “OPEC+ set for fourth oil quota hike since Hormuz closure,” 7 June 2026 — OPEC+ output data cited for background.
- Oilprice.com, Brent and WTI price levels, 20–21 October 2026.
Illustrative image. Photo: NASA Johnson Space Center, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — source
