The five-day-old war with Iran spread far beyond the Middle East on Wednesday as an American submarine torpedoed an Iranian Navy ship off Sri Lanka and NATO air defenses shot down an Iranian ballistic missile that was heading toward Turkish airspace.
The Iranian warship, the IRIS Dena, with a crew of 180, sank in international waters in the Indian Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from Iran. The Sri Lankan Navy rescued 32 critically injured sailors and was searching for more survivors but had encountered only bodies floating in the water near an oil slick and empty lifeboats, a spokesman said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said it was the first time a U.S. submarine had fired a torpedo at a ship since World War II. But it was NATO’s introduction into the conflict that made clear the widening scope of the fight.
“Iran is broadening the war to countries that did not attack it,” Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign affairs minister, said at a news conference with European Union leaders in Warsaw. He said, “There is a well-known saying: It’s worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.”
In Washington, Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a measure that would have limited President Trump’s power to continue the war against Iran without congressional authorization. The 53-to-47 vote against taking up the measure fell largely along party lines. Democrats had insisted that Congress weigh in on the open-ended military campaign.
The Iranian missile that was heading toward Turkish airspace flew over Iraq and Syria before NATO shot it down over the eastern Mediterranean, according to a Turkish Defense Ministry statement. It did not say what the missile’s target was believed to have been, but since first coming under attack on Saturday, Iran has launched hundreds of missiles and drones at countries that host U.S. military facilities.
Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base hosts a sizable U.S. Air Force contingent, but Turkey has said that it would not allow its airspace to be used for attacks on Iran. A senior U.S. military official and a Western official said the Iranian strike had targeted that air base. Both officials said the missile had been shot down by an interceptor fired from a U.S. warship in the eastern Mediterranean.
An attack on Turkey, a NATO member that shares a 300-mile border with Iran, could activate NATO’s mutual defense clause, potentially drawing the alliance’s 32 member states into the war.
NATO condemned the Iranian incursion.
“NATO stands firmly with all allies, including Turkey, as Iran continues its indiscriminate attacks across the region,” Allison Hart, a spokeswoman for the military alliance, said in a statement. “Our deterrence and defense posture remains strong across all domains, including when it comes to air and missile defense.”
Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, spoke by phone with his Iranian counterpart about the missile and said that any action that could cause the conflict to spread should be avoided, Turkey’s foreign ministry said.
The Turkish defense ministry said it would consult with its NATO allies and protect the country from any attacks. “All necessary steps to defend our territory and airspace will be taken resolutely and without hesitation,” it said.
As Mr. Hegseth warned that the war was still in its early stages, Israeli forces bombed command centers of the Basij, the powerful Iranian state paramilitary group, on Wednesday after striking Iran’s police stations, detention centers and intelligence offices alongside U.S. forces. Analysts said the goal might be to weaken the Iranian government’s ability to crack down on protests and encourage Iranians to overthrow their leaders, one of Mr. Trump’s stated goals.
Mr. Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that there would be no letup in the American and Israeli strikes, which they said were devastating Iran’s ballistic missile program, its naval fleet and its military and security leadership.
Mr. Hegseth that the leader of an Iranian covert unit that once plotted to assassinate Mr. Trump had been killed in a U.S. strike on Iran. He provided few details, but in 2024, American officials said they had uncovered an Iranian plot to kill Mr. Trump — an attempt at revenge for the U.S. drone strike that killed a prominent Iranian military figure, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.
Mr. Hegseth said that American and Israeli warplanes would soon gain total control of Iranian airspace, allowing them to pick off targets and deliver “death and destruction all day long.”
But Iran still has the capacity to fire on other countries, and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait all announced new Iranian strikes on Wednesday. Some of them have drawn in European countries that had hoped to avoid being entangled in the war.
Britain and France, neither of which is part of the assault on Iran, announced they would deploy their navies and air forces to help repel Iranian attacks. And Greece sent planes and warships to neighboring Cyprus, where a British military base was hit by a drone on Sunday.
The Netherlands said that it was weighing a request from France to use its military to help secure international shipping routes, where attacks on tankers and merchant vessels have choked off international oil and gas shipments. On Wednesday, a Maltese-flagged container ship was struck by an unknown projectile while trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway off Iran’s southern coast, which carries a fifth of the world’s oil.
The Iran war is “rapidly widening” and has created a “dangerous moment” for Europe, Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said at the news conference in Poland on Wednesday. Iran, she said, is trying to “sow chaos and set the region on fire by indiscriminately attacking” other countries.
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, warned Iran that it had a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia, which deems an attack on one nation to be an attack on both. “It is a sovereign agreement, and we are bound by that,” the Pakistani foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, told the Pakistani Senate. Iranian leaders, he said, “should keep that in mind.”
Iran sought on Wednesday to assuage neighboring Persian Gulf countries angered by its attacks.
Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, told the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, that Iranian strikes were directed at “American interests and did not target the State of Qatar,” the Qatari foreign ministry said.
Mr. al-Thani “categorically rejected” that argument, the ministry said. Iran, he said, is “seeking to inflict harm on its neighbors and drag them into a war that is not theirs.”
Sri Lanka has not taken a public stance on the war and has long maintained friendly relations with Iran, analysts said. The country said it had responded to the sinking of the Iranian ship in line with its commitment to an international maritime search-and-rescue treaty.
More than 870 people have been killed in the fighting in the Middle East since Saturday, officials said. The vast majority of them have been in Iran, but Iranian strikes have also killed people in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Israel and Kuwait, where six U.S. service members were killed.
There has been little sign of any international diplomacy aimed at brokering an end to the conflict. But China said it would send a special envoy to the Middle East to help mediate, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.
In public statements, the Chinese government has condemned the U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran, calling it “unacceptable” to “kill the leader of a sovereign country” and urging an immediate diplomatic solution to the conflict.
Reporting was contributed by Ben Hubbard, Jeanna Smialek, Lizzie Dearden, Lara Jakes, Aaron Boxerman, Elian Peltier, Julian E. Barnes, Tyler Pager, Pranav Baskar, Christiaan Triebert, Pamodi Waravita, Anupreeta Das and Lynsey Chutel.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
The post As Attacks Spread, War With Iran Reaches Far Beyond Mideast appeared first on New York Times.
