There are no fishing boats anymore.
That’s not an inference or an interpretation. That’s the President of the United States, speaking to the Canadian Prime Minister, describing what his military has accomplished in the Caribbean. “We’ve taken a very hard stand on drugs,” he said. “There are no boats anymore, frankly there are no fishing boats, there’s no boats out there period.”
He said it like it was a good thing.
Since January 2025, the United States military has conducted at least 44 strikes on 45 vessels in Caribbean waters, killing at least 151 people. Pete Hegseth calls it counternarcotics. He posts the footage to social media. The explosions are clean and photogenic — a vessel here, a plume of water there, the whole thing compressed into a shareable clip that plays like a video game highlight reel, stripped of the bodies and the screaming and the men clinging to wreckage in open water. It is violence as content. Death as brand management. And it is happening, over and over, to people for whom the United States government has offered not a single piece of public evidence of guilt.
Not one.
No intelligence reports. No verified manifests. No named suspects. No legal process of any kind. The accusation — drug trafficker — is the verdict, and the verdict is a missile.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul obtained documents showing that 21% of Coast Guard interdictions in these waters turn up no drugs at all — meaning roughly one in five of these strikes could be hitting the wrong boat entirely. Governments and families across Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago have come forward to identify victims: fishermen, day laborers, men transiting between islands for work. Human Rights Watch concluded the campaign constitutes a pattern of extrajudicial killings, with no credible legal basis under international human rights law — which requires, at minimum, imminent threat, no viable alternative, and proportionality. None of those standards, Human Rights Watch found, have been met.
The commander of US Southern Command raised questions about the legality of the strikes and offered to resign. The United Kingdom stopped sharing intelligence with the United States because it believes the campaign is illegal and refuses to be complicit. The UK is right.
But here’s the detail that doesn’t make the highlight reel. On September 2nd, a strike left two men alive. Shirtless. Unarmed. Disoriented. Clinging to wreckage in the open water. SEAL Team 6 came back and killed them in a second strike. Hegseth initially called reporting on this fake news — then confirmed it and said he would have made the same call. He also said: “I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I moved on to my next meeting.” He found out later that the survivors had been, in his word, “eliminated.”
This is not a man haunted by what he has authorized. This is a man who moved on to his next meeting. Keep that in mind. Because he’s going to come up again.
The Council on Foreign Relations and multiple independent analysts have noted that this campaign has long been understood not primarily as drug interdiction but as a vehicle for forced regime change in Venezuela — which means the legal justification is even thinner than advertised, and the people dying in the water are even more incidental than the government is willing to acknowledge. They are not combatants in a war. They are not defendants in a court. They are not anything, to this government, except an opportunity for content.
There are no fishing boats anymore.
That’s what winning looks like to this regime.
“We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”
— Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense
On February 15th, 2026, the Iranian Navy frigate IRIS Dena sailed into the port of Visakhapatnam, India, as an honored guest. Her crew marched in a city parade. They visited the Taj Mahal. They posed for photographs on deck with the Iranian flag behind them, grinning in the Indian sun. The Indian Navy welcomed them on social media — “reflecting long-standing cultural links between the two nations,” the post read. They were there for MILAN 2026, India’s flagship multinational naval exercise, and the concurrent International Fleet Review, attended by representatives of 74 countries. The theme of the exercise was “United Through Oceans.”
The IRIS Dena was Iran’s representative at that gathering. She was a Moudge-class frigate, launched in 2015, commissioned in 2021 — a capable ship whose crew had been selected for the posting precisely because this was a diplomatic mission, not a combat one. They were Iran’s handshake across the water. They sailed in formation with Indian Navy ships. They attended seminars. They competed in sporting fixtures. They were, in every meaningful sense, guests.
The exercise ended February 25th. The IRIS Dena left Indian waters and began the long transit home to Iran, sailing south and west through the Indian Ocean. Seven days later, in the early hours of March 4th — while many of the crew were gathered in the mess hall to break the Ramadan fast — the USS Charlotte, a Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, fired two Mark 48 torpedoes at her hull. One connected. The IRIS Dena sank in two to three minutes. She went down approximately 19 nautical miles off the coast of Galle, Sri Lanka, in international waters, 2,000 miles away from the war zone.
The USS Charlotte left.
At 5:08am local time, the Sri Lanka Navy received a distress call — from the ship itself, not from the United States. Sri Lanka launched a joint search and rescue operation, later joined by Indian Navy vessels deploying from Kochi. By the time rescue ships reached the coordinates, the IRIS Dena was gone. There was nothing at the surface but patches of oil and sailors in the water. Sri Lanka recovered 87 bodies. It rescued 32 survivors. More than 100 crew members remain unaccounted for. The residents of Visakhapatnam — who had hosted these same sailors weeks before, who had watched them march in the city parade — expressed anguish for the men they had welcomed.
Pete Hegseth called the IRIS Dena a “prize ship.” He described her death as a “quiet death.” Gen. Dan Caine said: “To hunt, find and kill an out-of-area deployer is something that only the United States can do at this type of scale.”
They are proud of this. They want you to know they are proud of this.
The Second Geneva Convention requires parties to a conflict to search for and collect shipwrecked personnel after naval engagements. There is active legal debate about the constraints submarines face in surfacing after a torpedo strike — a submarine’s survival depends on stealth, and surfacing exposes it. But there is no comparable legal debate about notification. The USS Charlotte did not notify anyone.
The ship’s own distress call is what saved the 32 men who survived. The US then pressured Sri Lanka not to repatriate the survivors back to Iran, and reportedly inquired whether any defections could be encouraged. These are men floating in oil slicks in the Indian Ocean, and the US government’s follow-up question was whether any of them could be flipped.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called it “an atrocity at sea.” Indian opposition leaders demanded to know why their government had said nothing — a ship that had marched in an Indian parade, that had sailed under Indian diplomatic hospitality, had been hunted and killed in India’s backyard, and the government’s response was silence. Former Indian Navy chief Arun Prakash said New Delhi should formally convey deep concern. Former diplomat Kanwal Sibal said the values that MILAN was built on had been “undermined” — and noted that exercise protocol bars participating ships from carrying ammunition, which would have left the IRIS Dena unable to defend herself when struck. That specific claim has not been independently confirmed. What is confirmed is this: she was seven days out of a diplomatic naval exercise, in transit, in international waters, far from any theater of declared combat, when she was sunk. And then she was left.
The men of the IRIS Dena were not combatants in the moment they died. They were sailors going home.
Keep that in mind too.
On the morning of February 28th, 2026, girls filed into the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province, for another day of classes. They were seven years old. Eight. Eleven. Twelve. The school had been walled off from an adjacent IRGC naval facility since 2016. It was not a military target. It was a school.
The first missile hit during morning classes.
The principal did what principals do in that moment — she moved the surviving children. She gathered them and she took them somewhere she believed was safer, the school’s prayer hall, and she called their parents to come. Parents rushed from their homes and their workplaces toward the school. Some of them received phone calls from their children. Some of them were close enough to hear the second explosion.
The second strike hit the prayer hall.
Two Red Crescent medics and the father of a slain child told Middle East Eye that only a small number of the children moved to shelter survived the second strike. A father whose daughter lived through the first explosion arrived to find she had been killed in the second. She was identified by the school bag she was still holding. Iranian officials — the mayor of Minab and the Ministry of Education — say the school was struck three times in total, not twice. Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations Unit geolocated video footage and confirmed the school was intact at 10:23am and struck by a guided missile by 10:45am. The Iranian Red Crescent issued a public warning in the aftermath: do not rush to bombed sites. Some munitions, they said, are programmed to detonate again, turning rescuers and survivors into additional casualties.
This is not a new accusation against Pete Hegseth. In September 2024, there were credible allegations that a vessel in the Caribbean had been struck twice — the second time to kill survivors who had made it out of the water after the first strike. Hegseth confirmed the practice and said he supported it. The American military calls this pattern a “double tap.” The rest of the world, including Unfugginbelievable, calls it a war crime.
Almost all of the 165 people killed in Minab were girls between seven and twelve years old. Sixty-nine of them were so severely damaged by the blast that they could not be identified, and their remains were sent for DNA testing. A mass funeral filled the streets of Minab on March 3rd. The city had eight kilometers of small graves.
Multiple independent investigations — by the New York Times, NPR, CBC, and Al Jazeera — concluded the United States was most likely responsible for the Minab strike. CBC specifically noted that Minab’s location in Iran’s south falls within US rather than Israeli operational zones, near the Strait of Hormuz. The US has said it is investigating. Pete Hegseth said: “All that I know is that we’re investigating that. Of course, we never target civilians.” This from a man who watched two survivors clinging to wreckage in the Caribbean and moved on to his next meeting when they were eliminated. This from an administration that the Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates has killed more than 400,000 noncombatants across its 21st century wars.
Of course we never target civilians.
In the Caribbean, the targets were drug traffickers, the government said. No evidence required. In the Indian Ocean, the target was a warship, the government said. The fact that she was sailing home from a diplomatic naval exercise in a country the United States was not at war with — that’s a detail. The men going home are a detail. In Minab, there is no claim being made at all — just an investigation. A school full of girls is a detail. A prayer hall full of children who survived the first missile and died in the second is a detail. The school bag that identified a girl who had been moved to safety is a detail.
These are not three unconnected stories. They are three acts of the same story: a government that has decided that evidence is optional, that survival is inconvenient, that accountability is for other countries, and that the footage of things exploding is the point. A former Faux News host, active alcoholic cosplaying as Secretary of Defense, who moved on to his next meeting. A president who brags that there are no boats anymore. A military apparatus that posts its kills to social media and calls it deterrence.
The fishermen in the Caribbean did not get a trial. The sailors of the IRIS Dena did not get a rescue. The girls of Minab did not get a warning.
What they got was a second strike. A double tap.
The International Criminal Court defines war crimes as serious violations of the laws and customs of war. Legal scholars, international law experts, and multiple allied governments are now using that framework — carefully, soberly, on the record — to describe what this administration is doing. The United Kingdom has already walked away from intelligence-sharing rather than be complicit. India is sitting in furious, frightened silence, trying to figure out what it means that a ship it invited as an honored guest was hunted and killed in its own maritime backyard. The UN has called what happened in Minab “a grave assault on children.”
The rest of the world is watching. The rest of the world is keeping count.
There are no fishing boats anymore.
There is no fishing boat anymore because they are all gone, and the men in them are gone, and this government posted the footage and called it a win. There is a frigate at the bottom of the Indian Ocean because she was sailing home from a parade, and a nuclear submarine put her there, and then left. There is a prayer hall in Minab where a principal moved her students because she was trying to save them, and it became the place where they died, and their fathers identified them by their school bags.
This is what the Department of War looks like when no one makes it stop.
Make it fucking stop.
**Unfugginbelievable is an independent, reader-supported investigation into the things that make us want to flip a table — then flip it back over and document everything on it. Every claim is fact-checked. Every source is real. No ads, no sponsors, no corporate overlords telling us what to leave out. If this work matters to you and you want to keep us caffeinated while we do it, buy us a cuppa at buymeacoffee.com/unfugginbelievable. We’ll drink it while reading the next filing.
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