The United States may have committed a war crime by sinking an Iranian ship

WASHINGTON – The U.S. torpedoing of an Iranian frigate off Sri Lanka this week may have violated the Geneva Conventions by failing to help rescue sailors from the stricken warship., an act that could potentially endanger American service members in this and future wars.

The 312-foot Dena and its 130-member crew, many of them Iranian naval band musicians, had just finished participating in an Indian government naval exercise and cultural exchange that also included the U.S. Navy and were returning home Wednesday. After leaving Sri Lanka, it was hit by a torpedo fired from a US Navy submarine about 20 miles off the southern tip of the island.. The gun appears to have breached the hull from below and the warship sank rapidly. The submarine did not attempt to rescue the Iranian sailors in the water.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt boasted that the attack included the first American use of a torpedo to sink a ship since World War II. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, narrating a video of the attack, used the same gloating tone. “An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death,” he intoned.

Sri Lanka Presidential Media Division via News

Hegseth had previously mocked “stupid rules of engagement” that aim to limit civilian deaths and other actions that could constitute war crimes.

“There is an affirmative duty to rescue under the Geneva Conventions,” said Mark Nevitt, a former Navy lawyer on the judge’s staff of attorneys general and now a law professor at Emory University.

He and other legal experts warn that ignoring those and other rules invites mistreatment, including death, of Americans who are shipwrecked or captured.

The Geneva Conventions, the 1949 agreements governing international armed conflicts, state that after a naval confrontation, “the parties to the conflict shall take, without delay, all possible measures to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded and sick, to protect them against looting and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care and to search for the dead and prevent their dispossession.”

However, after sinking the Dena, the attacking submarine appears to have done none of that, instead leaving it to the Sri Lankan authorities to search for survivors and collect the bodies of the dead.

Laurie Blank, also a professor of international law at Emory, said the rule applies to submarines as well, and if the submarine did not have the capacity or space to care for the shipwrecked sailors, the crew still had an obligation to do what they could to save their lives.

“This rule reflects and maintains the long-standing customary duty to rescue and save lives at sea,” he said. “In such a case, taking all possible measures would mean that the submarine should transmit the location of possible survivors to other ships, aircraft or shore facilities that can provide assistance, or at least to a higher headquarters, as soon as possible.”

When asked about the submarine’s actions, a Defense Department spokesperson said: “We will not discuss operational details related to the submarine or actions following the engagement. Sri Lankan authorities responded quickly to the vessel’s distress signals and conducted search and rescue operations that recovered the survivors. We deferred to the Sri Lankan government for additional details on those efforts.”

However, it took Sri Lankan rescuers at least an hour to reach the scene and it is unknown how many of the 87 dead so far might have survived if the US submarine had surfaced as the Dena was sinking.

The US Navy’s own “Manual on the Law of Naval Operations” largely repeats the language of the Geneva Conventions, but adds a warning: “To the extent permitted by military exigencies, after each engagement all possible measures must be taken without delay to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded and sick and recover the dead.”

That clause, “to the extent military exigencies permit,” could be used by the Navy to justify the submarine not participating in the rescue, Nevitt said.

“The basic idea is that any ship, including a submarine, must do everything possible to rescue shipwrecked enemy sailors. Attacking them would be a war crime.”

– Marko Milanovic, professor of international law at the University of Reading in England

Submarines are virtually undetectable underwater, but especially vulnerable to attack when on the surface. Their structure, with limited deck space and relatively small size, also makes them unsuitable for search and rescue.

“It’s a submarine, it’s secret, it’s very small,” Nevitt said, adding that the Navy jealously guards the location of all its submarines, both nuclear-armed missile ships and attack submarines.

“The basic idea is that any ship, including a submarine, must do everything possible to rescue shipwrecked enemy sailors. Attacking them would be a war crime,” said Marko Milanovic, a professor of international law at the University of Reading in England. “The problem is that submarines are not best equipped to perform this type of mission, and to do so they would have to surface, which could expose them to attack.”

In this particular case, however, it is not clear how surfacing to assist in a rescue would have endangered the submarine, given that the sinking took place 1,600 nautical miles from the Persian Gulf, where virtually all naval combat takes place.

“There are still some questions,” Nevitt said.

In any case, whether the submarine crew’s failure to assist in the rescue technically violates the Geneva Conventions is an academic question. The United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court, and the Trump administration in particular has openly denigrated the very concept of international law, as demonstrated most recently by the extrajudicial executions of more than 150 suspected drug traffickers in the southern Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

Most importantly, Nevitt and others said, by ignoring the spirit, if not the letter, of the Geneva Conventions, the United States is endangering the lives of service members in this and subsequent conflicts.

“That’s a fundamental problem with the way this Pentagon operates,” said Brian Finucane, who spent a decade in the State Department’s legal office. “This Secretary of Defense has a long history of denigration of the laws of war.”

In fact, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi alluded to that in a Thursday social media post after the sinking. “The United States has perpetrated an atrocity at sea, 2,000 miles off the coast of Iran. The frigate Dena, a guest of the Indian Navy carrying nearly 130 sailors, was attacked in international waters without warning. Mark my words: the United States will come to bitterly regret the precedent it has set,” he wrote.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine said Wednesday that the attack demonstrated American military prowess. “This is an incredible demonstration of America’s global reach,” he said. “Hunting, finding and killing an out-of-area deployer is something only the United States can do on this kind of scale.”

In reality, however, finding and sinking the Dena was probably not difficult, given that just days before it was openly docked in a southern Indian port in the multinational naval exercise where US Navy personnel had also been and participated in anti-submarine warfare exercises.

“Our partnership is based on our shared values ​​and strategic interests. When we operate and exercise together in the Indian Ocean like here in MILAN, we strengthen our capabilities, leading to a stronger, more credible deterrence that maintains peace and security in the region,” Steve Koehler, commander of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, said in a news release a week before the attack.