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The U.S. fatally bombed a wedding in southern Iran on Tuesday, killing at least four people, including children, prompting the U.S. to be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for potential war crimes.
U.S. munitions struck a house in which a wedding ceremony was being held in the city of Kuhestak, located in Sirik County. The Iranian Red Crescent and local officials said that at least four people were killed, including two children: 4-year-old Amir Ali Karimi, 16-year-old Mohammad Malahi, 43-year-old Kolsoum Malahi, and 43-year-old Zarkhatoun Taheri, per Al Jazeera. At least 68 others were injured, reports say.
Iranian officials reported that the U.S. also hit other civilian sites in a flurry of strikes on southern Iran on Tuesday evening, including a civilian airport. The renewed attacks came after a pause in U.S. strikes, during which Trump administration officials pledged that further kinetic action would be unnecessary due to its new sweeping sanctions regime.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society, which helped provide emergency services after the strike, said the attack is a war crime that must be prosecuted in the Hague.
“Given the reported civilian character of the location as the venue of a family wedding ceremony, as well as the presence of civilians at the site, the incident raises serious concerns under international humanitarian law (IL) and warrants an independent, impartial, thorough, and effective investigation,” the group said in a letter to the ICC’s chief prosecutor on Wednesday.
Video of the aftermath of the strike shared by the Red Crescent shows a building in utter chaos. People are yelling as they scramble over piles of rubble scattered everywhere, inside and outside.
“The U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC,” said U.S. Central Command spokesperson Tim Hawkins, in response to reports of the strike.
However, the missile apparently used in the strike has been advertised as the U.S. Navy’s “most accurate weapon.” From pictures of the weapons fragments left behind at the site, weapons identification expert Trevor Ball identified the attack as using components of Boeing’s Stand-Off Land Attack Missile-Expanded Response (SLAM-ER). In a press release about the weapon in 2005, Boeing bragged that, in a test, the SLAM-ER received target information mid-air, “changed its course and directly hit the target.”
The U.S. has a long, sordid history of attacking weddings. Early in the U.S.’s war on Afghanistan in 2002, the U.S. struck a house full of wedding guests, killing at least 30. Then, in 2008, a U.S. air strike killed 47 civilians as they were on their way to a wedding in the village of Wech Baghtu, in Afghanistan. The strike killed the bride.
Another wedding procession was a victim of President Barack Obama’s drone strike campaign in Yemen in December 2013, when the U.S. launched Hellfire missiles on a convoy that killed at least 12 civilians and apparently wounded the face of the bride.
In all, since 2001, the U.S. has struck at least eight wedding parties. Tuesday’s strike happened just a couple dozen miles away from the town of Minab, where the U.S. struck an elementary school on the first day of its war on Iran, killing 168 people, most of them children.
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