Gulf trucks cruise desert corridor as war chokes Strait of Hormuz

With the Strait of Hormuz turned into a virtual parking lot for cargo ships, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have created an emergency corridor with thousands of trucks hauling their loads across the Arabian desert from Gulf ports to the Red Sea.

Shipping companies, including MSC and Maersk, and Saudi mining giant Maaden have grown dependent on the improvised land bridge over the past three months since the Iran war practically shut down the Strait, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The regional disruption has also turned secondary ports into strategic hubs for Gulf logistics, with the UAE’s Khor Fakkan handling 50,000 containers a week compared with 2,000 before the conflict.

Saudi Arabia’s East-West oil pipeline and the UAE’s export hub in Fujairah are picking up some of the slack as neighboring states try to wean themselves from dependence on Hormuz, which carries a fifth of the world’s oil trade.

As the Gulf states have sought to knit their territories together with improved rail transportation, attention has also focused on rehabilitating Jordan’s old Hejaz train line, with Turkey, Syria and Israel proposing extensions to reach their Mediterranean ports. Emirati and Jordanian officials oversaw the signing of a $2.3 billion deal last month to build a 360-kilometer (224-mile) cargo train route reaching the Red Sea port in Aqaba.

The war is also forcing fundamental changes in the airline industry, with low-cost air travel close to becoming a thing of the past because of soaring fuel prices, the Financial Times reports.