U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said Wednesday that the United States is “winning in Iran,” as he announced the arrival of additional American forces to the region and vowed an intensified campaign alongside Israel.
“We are punching them while they are down,” Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon. “More waves are coming. We are just getting started.”
Hegseth said the United States and Israel would have “complete control of Iran's skies in under a week” and that Washington would draw on an “unlimited stockpile of precision gravity bombs.” He also asserted that Iran “had no intention of negotiating a nuclear deal with the United States.”
In a separate development, Hegseth said a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship off the southern coast of Sri Lanka on Wednesday.
Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath told parliament earlier that 180 people were on board the Iranian vessel, which he identified as the IRIS Dena. A ship named IRINS Dena was listed as participating in a naval drill in the Bay of Bengal from Feb. 18 to 25, according to the exercise’s website.
Sri Lankan navy spokesman Cmdr. Buddhika Sampath said bodies had been recovered from the sea in the area of the incident. Thirty-two people were rescued by the Sri Lankan navy and were being treated at a hospital in the southern port city of Galle.
The navy received a distress call from an Iranian ship and alerted the Sri Lankan air force, and both launched a search and rescue operation, Sampath said. Rescue boats that reached the site saw only an oil slick and no vessel, he said, adding that the incident occurred outside Sri Lankan waters but that Colombo remained committed to providing assistance.
Sri Lankan forces had not observed any other ship or aircraft in the area, he said, and were focused on saving lives. An investigation into the cause of the incident would follow.
The U.S. military also said Wednesday that it killed an Iranian official who headed a unit allegedly behind a plot to assassinate President Donald Trump.
“The leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed,” Hegseth said, adding that the operation took place Tuesday. He did not name the individual. In 2024, the Justice Department charged an Iranian man in connection with an alleged plot ordered by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to assassinate Trump, then president-elect.
Hegseth also said he saw “no sense” that an Iranian ballistic missile launch toward Turkey earlier Wednesday — the first such incident involving a NATO member in the current conflict — would trigger NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause.
In that incident, Turkey’s Defense Ministry said NATO air defense systems in the eastern Mediterranean intercepted an Iranian ballistic missile headed toward Turkish territory. Missile debris was located in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border. No injuries were reported, and Turkish officials described the event as unprecedented.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, lodged a protest with his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, over the launch. A diplomatic source in Ankara said Fidan warned that steps that could further widen the conflict must be avoided.