The United States has urged Iranian naval personnel serving in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, IRGC-N, to abandon their posts and return home, signalling that more attacks are planned against the force after the death of its commander, Admiral Alireza Tangsiri.
The warning came in a statement attributed to US Central Command chief Admiral Brad Cooper, who said strikes on the IRGC-N would continue and called on all serving personnel to leave immediately to avoid further injury or death. The statement followed Washington’s confirmation that Tangsiri was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
The American message shifts the focus from the killing itself to what may come next. By directly telling Iranian naval officers and sailors to go home, Washington appears to be signalling that the campaign against the IRGC-N is ongoing and that additional military pressure is likely. This is an inference based on the wording of the US statement and its explicit warning that strikes will continue.
Tangsiri was one of Iran’s most prominent naval commanders and a central figure in the IRGC’s operations around the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global oil shipping route. The US Treasury designated him in 2019 under its counterterrorism sanctions framework and, in 2023, linked him to Iran’s drone and cruise missile activity through Paravar Pars, an Iranian UAV manufacturer.
The latest US statement also claimed that 92 per cent of Iran’s large naval vessels have been eliminated since the start of what it called Operation Epic Fury, though that battlefield assessment has not been independently verified in the material reviewed.
Iran had not publicly confirmed Tangsiri’s death in the material reviewed at the time of reporting. That leaves key parts of the operational picture dependent on US and Israeli accounts, even as Washington has now publicly endorsed the core claim that the IRGC-N chief was killed.
