The Caroline Bezengi, Aug. 16 -- The oil did not announce itself. It crept out through the hull of a half-sunken tanker named Caroline Bezengi, spreading across the surface of the Gulf of Oman in slow, dark tendrils, until satellite imagery on June 30 confirmed what responders had quietly feared since June 8: a major spill was under way in one of the region's last ecologically significant marine zones.

a sanctioned vessel linked to Russia's shadow fleet - exploded and caught fire while transiting Omani waters. Her crew abandoned ship. The tanker, believed to carry an estimated 40 million gallons of crude oil, drifted until it grounded on a reef near an uninhabited island off the Omani coast. What followed was one of the worst maritime en...