UN Reports Accuse US of War Crimes in Iran School Strike and Caribbean Narco Operations

This month the United Nations released two reports alleging that the United States committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. The first, from the UN Independent International Fact‑Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, concluded that US forces carried out two attacks on Iran on the opening day of the war, killing civilians—including over 120 children. The second, covering Operation Southern Spear in the Caribbean Sea, described an extravagantly murderous campaign by the Trump administration against alleged drug traffickers using small vessels.

These narco‑strikes (reportedly 68 incidents, resulting in 223 deaths) led Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism Ben Saul to find “reasonable grounds” that they constituted “crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law.” The killings were “unlawful and intentional under international law.”

On February 28, during the opening phase of the US pre‑emptive, illegal war against Tehran, American forces bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. More than 160 people died, among them 123 children under 13 years of age. The school, which the Defense Intelligence Agency had labelled a legitimate military target, was struck by three missiles. (This was later dismissed as a “targeting error” based on outdated intelligence: the site had originally been part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base, was separated from that facility between 2013 and 2016, and converted into a civilian educational facility.) The same day, an athletic facility in Lamerd city, Fars Province, where girls were undergoing sports training, was hit by a Precision Strike Missile, killing 22 civilians—including two schoolgirls, two schoolboys, and a 2‑year‑old girl playing near her home.

The attack on Minab was found to be “a violation of the obligation to distinguish between civilian objects and military objectives and the prohibition of making civilian objects the object of an attack, as well as the principle of precaution.”

The strike on the Lamerd facility gave the Mission “reasonable grounds to believe” that it constituted “the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack resulting in loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects.”

The Minab attack was carried out with the requisite mental element of recklessness (dolus eventualis). This conclusion followed the Trump administration’s deprioritization of civilian harm mitigation, evidenced by public statements from senior officials scornful of international humanitarian law and the failure to update targeting databases for the school. Consequently, the United States directed the strikes at the school while being aware of a substantial risk of hitting a civilian object and acted recklessly regarding that possibility.

Regarding Operation Southern Spear, Saul’s briefing note found that the attacks on designated narco‑vessels amounted to “serious extrajudicial killings in violation of the right to life, being unjustified in national or personal self‑defence or under international humanitarian law, the law of the sea, narcotics suppression conventions, or international counter‑terrorism law.” The strikes did nothing to reduce cocaine supply or price, instead producing “ballooning effects” while ignoring the primary cause of overdose deaths in the United States—fentanyl and opioids. Most cocaine, in fact, is transported on container ships (not small vessels), most of which are never inspected at ports before crossing US land borders.

Saul also rejected the self‑defence justification advanced by the Trump administration. There is no inherent “right to use self‑defence against criminal groups listed as terrorist organizations.” Even if the vessels and crew were members of such groups, they have not mounted any “armed attack” on the United States that would trigger a right of self‑defence. The US did not claim these vessels and crew were armed with military means capable of launching attacks comparable to conventional forces.

The claim of an imminent threat to life was not demonstrated in the context of these killings. “The concept of an imminent threat to life does not stretch to encompass an attenuated chain of causation in which potential future deaths result from drug consumption after numerous intervening steps occur.” Moreover, there was no evidence that the use of force was a last resort, necessary, or proportionate, given Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s admission that vessels could have been intercepted but the United States chose to destroy them to deter other traffickers.

In terms of recommendations, Saul’s report proposes that Washington conduct necessary, impartial, independent, and transparent investigations into the killings; prosecute the relevant perpetrators in the chain of command, both military and political; and provide appropriate remedies and reparations to victims and families. It also notes, with regret, the penalization of former military personnel who had insisted that illegal orders be disobeyed.

“Even if humanitarian law applied, every combatant has a duty to disobey a manifestly unlawful order, including orders to commit the war crime of murdering civilians, and bears criminal liability where the person knew the order was unlawful or should have known because of the manifestly unlawful nature of the act so ordered.”

The outcome of these reports will likely be few and inconsequential. The war against Iran continues in a staggered fashion, threatening, if anything, to expand. At the UN General Assembly, President Donald Trump continued airing threats of existential annihilation against Tehran while fantasizing about unfulfilled war aims. Killing alleged narco‑terrorists remains a focus for US Southern Command. On September 19, SOUTHCOM announced, without providing details, the killing of “four narco‑terrorists” in a “lethal, kinetic strike on a go‑fast vessel operating along established narco‑trafficking routes in the Caribbean.” The intelligence behind the operation was described as “confirmed,” something only the most credulous inside or outside the Pentagon would accept without question.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has filed eight articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, citing the strike against the school in Minab and Operation Southern Spear as grounds.

Relevantly, Article IV charges the Secretary “with ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties,” while Article V alleges the replacement of “maritime law enforcement with unauthorized military targeting of suspected drug traffickers, resulting in at least 221 deaths.” Although a full House vote was scheduled for September 17, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders cancelled that day’s proceedings, postponing the vote until after the midterm elections. The rot, having set in from the top, shows few signs of being addressed.

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