On the morning of February 28, a missile struck an oil storage facility 200 meters from the ship Mohammad Shafiqul Islam commanded. The facility burst into flames, and the captain and his crew watched the tugboats battle the blaze. That was the moment the war arrived for the 31 men aboard the Banglar Joyjatra. It would be another 115 days before they were out of it.
Islam is a 51-year-old Bangladeshi mariner from Cumilla, in the east of the country. His ship, a bulk carrier chartered by a Singapore company, was carrying 39,000 tonnes of steel coils from Qatar’s Mesaieed port to Jebel Ali in the United Arab Emirates. The ship reached the outer port limits of Jebel Ali on February 26, two days before the missile strike. Then the war between the US, Israel and Iran shut the Gulf down around them. The cargo was eventually unloaded, but the ship could not leave. Ordered to sail east through the Strait of Hormuz, it was turned back by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards 46 km (25 nautical miles) from the strait. Every attempt to cross failed. In April, when a cease-fire was announced, the captain tried again. He was denied again.
The captain’s arithmetic
Islam carried a particular kind of responsibility through those months, and he put it in plain arithmetic: 31 lives, a ship worth $40 million, cargo valued at $8.2 million. He said later that he tried to stay calm because of what he was responsible for. When fresh water ran low and food became scarce, he rationed both. When the ship’s navigation system failed after the attacks, he navigated manually, looking for lighthouses to keep the vessel on course, a skill he said he had not used in years.
The crew was mostly young men, some on their first voyages. The captain watched them cope with the only tools available: some recited the Quran, others scrolled through TikTok, and he tried to keep everyone calm. Bangladesh’s ambassador to the UAE urged him to abandon the ship and evacuate. He stayed, hoping the situation would stabilize. The family back home spent sleepless nights, and his wife and children have since pressed him to give up the sea. He says he intends to keep sailing for many more years.
The ship finally received permission to cross the Strait of Hormuz on June 23. The crew relaxed only after the waterway was behind them. The relief, in the captain’s telling, was total.
The forgotten front line
Islam’s ordeal is one of thousands, and it is the human scale of a crisis the casualty reports never show. The United Nations says roughly 6,000 seafarers have been trapped on about 500 ships in the Gulf since the war began. The UN’s maritime agency has been trying to evacuate them for months with little progress, and its chief has said what should be obvious: merchant sailors are trained to carry cargo, not to fight, and their vessels are not built to survive missiles and drones. The stories around Islam’s are all versions of the same trap: a Thai-flagged ship engulfed in smoke, an Indian tanker whose crew kept working, Filipino sailors stuck in the strait, afraid and bored in equal measure.
The men on those ships are the reason the world’s trade keeps moving, and the war ran over them because they could not run away. The captain of the Banglar Joyjatra did what a captain could do: he stayed calm, rationed the water, and waited for the war to let him through. The war, in the end, did. The 6,000 others are still waiting, and the strait that trapped them is still barely open. The front line of this war includes a lot of men who never signed up to fight, and no one is counting their casualties, because they are not dead. They are just trapped.