Amid the grinding Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi aircraft intensified strikes on tankers carrying Iranian oil through the Persian Gulf, part of a campaign to strangle Tehran's oil revenue. The escalating attacks on neutral shipping drew the US Navy and other Western fleets into the Gulf to escort tankers, setting the stage for direct American-Iranian naval clashes later that year.
By 1987 the Iran-Iraq War had ground into its seventh year, a stalemate of trench warfare and human-wave attacks reminiscent of World War I. Unable to break the deadlock on land, Iraq shifted strategy toward economic strangulation, using French-supplied Mirage jets and Exocet missiles to hit tankers loading Iranian crude at Kharg Island and elsewhere in the Gulf.
Iran retaliated by attacking shipping tied to Iraq's Gulf allies, particularly Kuwait, which had bankrolled Baghdad's war effort. This 'Tanker War' internationalized the conflict: Kuwait requested protection, and both the Soviet Union and the United States began escorting tankers, with Washington reflagging Kuwaiti vessels under the American flag.
The militarization of Gulf shipping lanes led directly to the USS Stark incident in May 1987, when an Iraqi missile killed 37 American sailors, and later to the USS Vincennes' mistaken downing of an Iranian passenger jet in 1988, killing 290 civilians. The Tanker War demonstrated how a regional land war could metastasize into a global energy and naval crisis, a pattern that has recurred in Gulf conflicts since.