US Says Kills Four in New Attack on Alleged Drug-Smuggling Boat

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) - The United States military has conducted another deadly strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing four people in an operation that War Secretary Pete Hegseth declared would continue "until the attacks on the American people are over."

The strike, announced on Friday, is at least the fourth such lethal action taken against suspected narcotics traffickers in the Caribbean in just over a month, bringing the total death toll to at least 21 individuals.

This latest attack further highlights a U.S. policy that treats international drug smuggling not as a law enforcement issue but as an act of armed conflict, a strategy that has drawn fierce condemnation from regional leaders and legal experts but has been gleefully celebrated by top officials in the Trump administration.

In a direct and defiant message posted on the social media platform X, Secretary Hegseth announced the latest strike, accompanying his words with a dramatic video showing a speedboat being engulfed in smoke and flames at sea.

"Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike," the Pentagon chief wrote. He asserted that the operation "was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics -- headed to America to poison our people."

The message concluded with a clear vow of continued aggression: "These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!!"

Earlier this morning, on President Trump's orders, I directed a lethal, kinetic strike on a narco-trafficking vessel affiliated with Designated Terrorist Organizations in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the… pic.twitter.com/QpNPljFcGn

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) October 3, 2025

President Donald Trump also posted the same video on his Truth Social platform, framing the operation as a successful defense of the homeland. He claimed that "a boat loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE was stopped, early this morning off the Coast of Venezuela, from entering American Territory."

The president's director of communications, Steven Cheung, reacted to the news with celebratory language, stating that the traffickers and their "deadly drugs have been turned into stardust."

This aggressive military campaign is built on a legal framework that the Trump administration has recently sought to formalize. According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), which obtained a copy of a notice sent to the U.S. Congress, the administration has determined that the United States is officially engaged in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels.

The Pentagon notice, designed to legally justify at least three previous strikes, states that "The president determined these cartels are non-state armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States."

The document goes on to describe the suspected smugglers as "unlawful combatants," a classification that, in the administration's view, removes them from the protections afforded to civilians under international law and permits the use of lethal military force.

However, this legal justification has been met with intense skepticism and outright condemnation. Washington has not publicly released any evidence to support its assertion that the individuals targeted in these strikes were indeed drug smugglers.

Furthermore, as noted by AFP, a wide range of experts argue that the summary killings are illegal even if the targets are confirmed narcotics traffickers, as they constitute extrajudicial executions outside of a declared and legally recognized armed conflict.

The reaction from leaders in Latin America has been scathing. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose government has been repeatedly and directly accused by Washington of running a "narco-terror cartel," decried the U.S. actions in the region as "an armed aggression to impose regime change, to impose puppet governments, and to steal Venezuela's oil, gas, gold and all natural resources."

Speaking at an event in Caracas, Maduro ordered the mobilization of his country's reservists and militias, warning that they should be prepared "if it is necessary to move from unarmed combat to armed combat."

Tensions between the two nations are already extremely high, exacerbated by a significant deployment of American warships in the region, which Washington says are for counter-narcotics missions but which Caracas views as a direct threat.

On Thursday, Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino denounced what he called an "illegal incursion" by five U.S. fighter jets off the country's shores, labeling the alleged flights a "provocation." This follows President Trump's dispatch last month of 10 F-35 aircraft to Puerto Rico, part of the largest U.S. military deployment in the area in over three decades.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a fierce critic of Trump's policy, also condemned the latest strike. "The narcoterrorists don't go in the boats -- the narcos live in the US, Europe and Dubai," he wrote on X. "There were poor Caribbean youths on that boat." Petro argued that striking vessels that could otherwise be intercepted at sea "violates the universal judicial principal of proportionality, and therefore is murder."

The series of lethal strikes began in early September.

As previously reported by Kurdistan24, the first "kinetic strike" on September 2 obliterated a vessel operated by suspected members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua narco-terrorist organization, killing 11 people.

This was followed by a second strike on September 16 that killed three Venezuelans, and a third on September 20 that killed another three individuals. Each operation has been announced by President Trump with dramatic social media posts, often including surveillance video of the explosions and stark, all-caps warnings to drug traffickers.

The policy is rooted in a strategic shift that began with the designation of several Latin American drug cartels, including Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs).

This reclassification provided the administration with what it claims is the legal justification for treating these criminal enterprises as military adversaries. According to The New York Times, this was further solidified in July when President Trump signed a still-secret order directing the military to begin using armed force against these groups.

This move has been described by human rights groups like Amnesty International USA as a possible "extrajudicial execution" with "absolutely no legal justification," and has prompted congressional Democrats, such as Senator Adam Schiff of California, to push for a war-powers measure to halt the operations, warning that they risk "dragging the United States into another war."

The Trump administration, however, has remained defiant, arguing that the strikes are a lawful and necessary act of national self-defense against groups that are poisoning Americans and that are directly supported by the "illegitimate Maduro regime."