A Mark-48 torpedo - one of the most lethal weapons in the American naval arsenal - fired from a US submarine in international waters. And the target was - IRIS Dena, an Iranian frigate sailing home from India's MILAN-26 naval exercise at Visakhapatnam. Next, more than 150 sailors left to die in the Indian Ocean, forty miles off Sri Lanka's coast. It is the first time since World War II that an American submarine has sunk an enemy warship with a torpedo. The saddest part is that it happened in India's backyard.
This is no longer a Middle Eastern war. It has arrived at India's door and we can no longer ignore this, say experts.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, addressing media after the incident, was brazen about it.The Iranian ship,he said, "thought it was safe in international waters." Instead, it was sent to the bottom. What he said next was even striking - "America is WINNING—decisively, devastatingly, and WITHOUT MERCY." The word that struck hard was "without mercy".
What he did not say — what the Pentagon has chosen not to address — is what happened next. Or rather, what did not happen. The US submarine did not search for survivors. It departed the area. The rescue of 32 critically injured sailors from 180 aboard fell entirely to the small Sri Lankan Navy, which did its best in that scenario to rescue sailors after receiving a distress signal at 5:08 a.m. But many men were left to the sea for dying. Bodies floated in oil slicks. Life rafts drifted. The ocean did the rest.
This is not just a military story. It is a legal one. And the law is unambiguous.
The Geneva Convention II — which the United States has ratified — requires belligerents to take all possible measures, "after each engagement and without delay," to search for and collect the shipwrecked. Article 18 of Geneva Convention II requires that belligerents take, after each engagement, all possible measures to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded, and sick — without discriminating between their own and enemy personnel.
The law does not end there. The DoD Law of War Manual is categorical: it is prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter. The manual further emphasises that the rule applies during non-international armed conflict as well.
And critically — the US Naval Handbook, according to Global Security, explicitly lists "offenses against the survivors of ships and aircraft lost at sea, including killing, wounding, or mistreating the shipwrecked" as representative war crimes.
Those drowning sailors in the Indian Ocean were not fighting anyone.
Professor Michael Schmitt of the University of Reading, an expert on the law of armed conflict, was quoted as saying by Just Security, ‘Under longstanding international law during both peacetime and armed conflict, there is an obligation to take practicable measures to rescue individuals who have been shipwrecked — an obligation reflected in both the law of the sea and the law of armed conflict."
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