The US Department of War said on Monday that US forces boarded an oil tanker in the Indian Ocean that the US military had tracked and followed for thousands of miles since it left the Caribbean.
The tanker, the Aquila II, was one of 16 that left Venezuela last month after the US attacked the country and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, according to The Associated Press.
The DoW said that the action against the tanker was part of the “quarantine” on sanctioned tankers in the Caribbean, which now involves controlling Venezuela’s oil trade and imposing an oil embargo on Cuba, causing fuel shortages in the Caribbean island nation and significantly exacerbating power outages and intensifying a humanitarian crisis.
“When the @DeptofWar says quarantine, we mean it,” the DoW wrote on X. “Overnight, US military forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding on the Aquila II without incident in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility.”
The Pentagon added that the tanker “was operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean. It ran, and we followed. The Department of War tracked and hunted this vessel from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.”
The post continued, “No other nation on planet Earth has the capability to enforce its will through any domain. By land, air, or sea, our Armed Forces will find you and deliver justice. You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us.”
The DoW did not state that the US seized the tanker. According to the AP, data transmitted from the ship indicate it’s not currently laden with oil, though other reports say it was carrying 700,000 barrels of oil when it left Venezuela. The Aquila II has been under US sanctions for allegedly transporting Russian oil.
