‘It Was More Fun’ to Kill Than Capture Iranians – Consortium News

The U.S. president said a military official told him it was “more fun” to kill rather than capture more than 100 Iranian sailors in the Indian Ocean who had just finished a training session. U.S. forces made no rescue effort. 

U.S. Department of War photo of IRIS Dena being sunk by a torpedo in the Indian Ocean on March 4, 2026. (DoW/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

By Stephen Prager
Common Dreams

President Donald Trump said the U.S. Navy chose to sink an Iranian frigate, killing more than 100 sailors last week, because it was “more fun” than capturing the vessel, even though the ship posed no threat.

Though death tolls vary, Iran’s state media organization, the Islamic Republic News Organization, reported on Sunday that 104 crew members were killed in the attack and that 32 others were injured when a U.S. submarine torpedoed the Iranian warship IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on March 4 as it departed from the Milan Peace 2026 naval drills hosted in India.

The Dena was more than 2,000 miles away from the Persian Gulf when it was attacked, far from the hostilities unleashed on Feb. 28 when the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran. Contradicting U.S. claims, Iranian and Indian officials have said it was not armed.

In what political commentator Adam Schwarz described as “the most blasé admission of a war crime by a U.S. president in history,” Trump on Monday casually recounted the U.S. Navy’s decision to attack the ship before a gathering of Republicans at a Congressional Institute event, a GOP-aligned nonprofit retreat organizer.

Trump: “I said, ‘Why don’t we just capture the ship? We could use it. Why did we sink them?’ He said, ‘It’s more fun to sink them.’ They like sinking them better.” pic.twitter.com/nR6KOxFCTY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 9, 2026

He suggested that the Navy blew the boat up not to neutralize a threat, but purely for its own sake.

After making the exaggerated boast that Iran’s navy is “gone” following aggressive U.S. bombing, Trump said at first he “got a little upset” with the military brass who ordered the sinking of the Dena, which he said they described as a “top-of-the-line” vessel.

Trump said he asked: “Why don’t we just capture the ship? We could have used it. Why did we sink them?”

He said that an unspecified official told him, “It’s more fun to sink them.”

As the crowd laughed, Trump went on, chuckling himself:

“They like sinking them better. They say it’s safer to sink them. I guess it’s probably true.”

Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, described the ship as operating in a purely “ceremonial” role and said it was “unloaded” and “unarmed” at the time of the attack last week.

Rahul Bedi, an independent defense analyst in India, told the Associated Press that while the ship may have used some limited non-offensive ammunition during naval exercises, drill protocol requires “the participating platforms to be unarmed.”

Dena during its commissioning in 2021. (MojNews /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has claimed the vessel was a “predator ship,” while the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has said claims that the ship was unarmed are “false.” However, it has provided no evidence that it posed a threat at the time of the attack.

The attack itself was likely legal under the rules of naval warfare, even if the ship was unarmed, though its ethical and tactical justification has been called into question.

“A military ship might be a lawful target,” Phyllis Bennis, the co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ New Internationalism Project told Common Dreams. “But firing on any ship — any people, anywhere — for ‘fun’ represents the kind of immoral depravity that this White House is infamous for.”

Bennis added that “failing to do everything possible to rescue those aboard is certainly a war crime,” as the Second Geneva Convention requires militaries to take all possible measures to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded, and sick.

Sri Lanka releases first pictures of the rescue operation after Iran Warship IRIS Dena was shot by the U.S Navy. Iran sailors being rescued. pic.twitter.com/FYLv6MiJUs

— Iran Observer (@24_70xu) March 6, 2026

The Dena’s 32 survivors, as well as dozens of dead bodies, had to be pulled from the water by a Sri Lankan joint rescue operation following a distress call. The survivors were quickly rushed to a local hospital in Galle City.

Hegseth has previously come under fire for reportedly ordering a second strike on shipwrecked sailors who survived the bombing of an alleged drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean.

Many have described that attack on Sept. 2 as an exceptionally blatant war crime in a broadly illegal campaign that has extrajudicially killed at least 156 people.

In carrying out its war against Iran, Hegseth has emphasized that the U.S. would not abide by what he called “stupid rules of engagement.”

Thousands of civilian targets, including schools, hospitals, and residential areas, have reportedly been attacked by U.S. and Israeli strikes, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.

As of Monday, Iranian Deputy Health Minister Ali Jafarian said at least 1,255 people have been killed, including 200 children and 11 healthcare workers.

Bennis said that even if attacking the ship itself was lawful in a vacuum, it took place before a backdrop of brazen “illegality.”

“This entire shocking episode represents a clear U.S. violation of what the Nuremberg trials identified as the ‘supreme international crime’: the crime of aggression,” she said. “The U.S. had no legal right to go to war against Iran. The [United Nations] Security Council had not authorized the use of force, and there was no ‘armed attack’ from Iran against the US that required immediate self-defense.

“Without either of those, the U.N. Charter is very clear that no country may attack another country,” she continued. “To do so, as the Nuremberg judges found, constitutes the crime of aggression — the ultimate crime.”