Arya News Agency -WASHINGTON – U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has issued a blunt new warning to Tehran, declaring that “if Iran fires on our ships, we will obliterate its oil tankers,” in a sharp escalation of rhetorical brinkmanship that comes as Washington continues to offer no official explanation or public accountability for its recent deadly airstrike on a wedding ceremony in Iran’s coastal Sirik district.
Hegseth’s remarks followed a Saturday announcement by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) confirming that American forces had conducted airstrikes on three Iranian crude oil tankers on September 5, after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) allegedly launched ballistic missiles toward two U.S. Navy warships conducting a routine patrol in regional waters. The Pentagon chief further asserted that Iran’s tanker fleet remains essentially defenseless, claiming that Tehran lacks the requisite naval or aerial capabilities to protect its maritime assets.
Iranian state television has acknowledged the U.S. strikes, reporting that American warplanes bombed three Iranian oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, adding that at least one of the vessels was empty at the time of the attack. CENTCOM, for its part, stated that a U.S. aircraft carrier and a guided-missile destroyer successfully evaded multiple what it called “unprovoked” Iranian attacks, with no American personnel reported injured.
Yet even as U.S. officials double down on military threats, a glaring silence persists regarding the September airstrike on a wedding gathering in Kuhstak, Sirik County—an attack independently investigated by The Telegraph, which cited evidence of a precision-guided 500-kilogram bomb. To date, the United States has neither formally acknowledged the incident nor offered any public response to mounting international and domestic calls for transparency and accountability over the civilian casualties it inflicted.
The contrast between Washington’s aggressive posture toward Iranian military assets and its apparent reluctance to address allegations of indiscriminate strikes on non-combatants has drawn sharp criticism from human rights advocates and regional observers, who argue that the dual-track approach undermines U.S. credibility on civilian protection and international humanitarian law. Tehran, meanwhile, has condemned both the tanker strikes and the wedding attack as acts of state terrorism, vowing to pursue all available legal and diplomatic channels in response.