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The US House of Representatives has joined the Senate in killing a war powers resolution that would have forced Donald Trump to end his war on Iran. Although the vote was largely symbolic, Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane says Democrats are using it to get Republicans on the record.

Videos showed a projectile striking near Kuwait’s Ali al-Salem Air Base, which has hosted a substantial number of US forces. Earlier on Thursday, the United States announced it was closing its embassy in the country and is reportedly evacuating its staff.

New Delhi, India — Dressed in a blue Navy uniform and sleek sunglasses, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in late October, addressed a gathering of the country’s sea warriors.

He listed out the strategic significance of the Indian Ocean — the massive volumes of trade and oil that pass through it. “The Indian Navy is the guardian of the Indian Ocean,” he then said, to loud, proud chants of “Long Live Mother India” from his audience.

Less than five months later, India has been shown up as a “guardian”, unable to protect its own guest.

On Wednesday, the Iranian warship, IRIS Dena, was torpedoed by a US submarine just 44 nautical miles off (81km) southern Sri Lanka, as it was returning home from naval drills hosted by India. During the “Milan” biennial multilateral naval exercise, Indian President Droupadi Murmu had posed with sailors from the Dena.

Yet it took the Indian Navy more than a day after the Iranian warship was struck to respond formally to the attack, which US officials made clear was a sign of how the Donald Trump administration was willing and ready to expand its war against Iran.

“An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters,” US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the Pentagon on Wednesday. “Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.”

Tehran is furious over the attack on its warship hundreds of miles away from home. And Iran made sure to note that the IRIS Dena warship was  “a guest of India’s navy”, returning after completing the exercise it joined upon New Delhi’s invitation.

“The US has perpetrated an atrocity at sea, 2,000 miles [3,218km] away from Iran’s shores,” Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said, referring to the sinking of the frigate. “Mark my words: The US will come to bitterly regret [the] precedent it has set.”

Now, the IRIS Dena is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, and more than 80 Iranian sailors, who marched during joint parades and posed for selfies with Indian naval officers during their two-week visit, are dead.

What has also fallen, said retired Indian naval officers and analysts, is India’s self-image as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean. Instead, they said, the US attack on the Dena has exposed the limits of India’s power and influence in its own maritime back yard.

‘War reaches India’s backyard’

After participating in the naval exercises, IRIS Dena left Visakhapatnam on India’s eastern coast on February 26. It was hit in international waters, just south of Sri Lanka’s territorial waters, in the early hours of March 4, local time.

In response, Sri Lankan Navy rescuers recovered more than 80 bodies and picked up 32 survivors, reportedly including the commander and some senior officers from the warship. More than 100 men are still missing.

In a tweet welcoming the Dena to the naval drills, the Indian Navy’s Eastern Command had posted: “Her arrival … [reflects] long-standing cultural links between the two nations [Iran and India]”.

Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha, the former vice chief of India’s naval staff, told Al Jazeera that he attended the Iranian parade at the function.

“I met and really liked them, especially their march for sailors travelling thousands of miles,” Sinha said. “It is always sad to see a ship sinking. But in a war, emotions don’t work. There’s nothing ethical in a war.”

Sinha said that the Indian Ocean — central to the strategic and energy security of the nation with the world’s largest population — was thought to be a fairly safe zone earlier. “But that is not the case, as we are learning now,” he told Al Jazeera.

“The unfolding battle [between the US and Israel on the one hand, and Iran on the other] has reached India’s back yard.
New Delhi has to be concerned,” Sinha, who served in the Indian Navy for four decades, added. “The liberty we enjoyed in the Indian Ocean has apparently shrunk.”

India’s Catch-22 situation

Only on Thursday evening did the Indian Navy issue any formal statement on the attack — more than 24 hours after the Dena was hit by a torpedo.

The Navy said that it received distress signals from the Iranian ship and had decided on deploying resources to help with rescuing sailors. But by then, it said, the Sri Lankan Navy had already stepped to lead the rescue effort.

Neither New Delhi nor the Navy has criticised — even mildly — the decision by the US to sink the Iranian warship.

Military analysts and former Indian naval officers say India is caught in a classic catch-22: Was India aware of the incoming US attack in the Indian Ocean on an Iranian warship, or was it blindsided by a nuclear-submarine in its backyard?

Admiral Arun Prakash, the former chief of India’s naval staff, told Al Jazeera that if New Delhi was blindsided, “it reflects on the US-India relationship directly.”

“If it is a surprise, then that’s a great concern since we have a so-called strategic partnership with the USA.”

And if India knew about the attacks, it would be seen by many as strategically siding with the US and Israel over their war on Iran.

C Uday Bhaskar, a retired Indian Navy officer and currently the director of the Society for Policy Studies, an independent think tank based in New Delhi, said that the US sinking an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean muddies the Indian perception of itself as a “net security provider” in the region.

Bhaskar said the incident is a “strategic embarrassment” for India and weakens New Delhi’s credibility in the Indian Ocean, while its moral standing “takes a beating” because of the Indian government’s near-silence.

‘India on aggressor’s side’

In the post-colonial world order, India was a leader of the non-alignment movement, the Cold War-era neutrality posture adopted by several developing nations.

India now no longer calls its approach non-alignment, instead referring to it as “strategic autonomy”. But, in reality, it has inched closer to the United States and its allies, most importantly, Israel.

Merely two days before the US and Israel bombed Iran, Modi was in Israel, addressing the Knesset and warmly hugging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called his Indian counterpart a brother.

But Iran, under the late Supreme Leader Khamenei, was a friend of India as well, with New Delhi making strategic, business, and humanitarian investments in the country.

However, Modi has not said a word in condolence after Khamenei’s assassination. On Thursday, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri visited the Iranian embassy in New Delhi to sign a memorial book. Indian governments normally deploy ministers — not bureaucrats or diplomats — for such sombre occasions.

It is against that backdrop that India’s response to the attack on the Dena has come under scrutiny.

Because the frigate was hit when it was in international waters, India had “no formal responsibility”, said Srinath Raghavan, an Indian military historian and strategic analyst.

“But the US Navy’s actions underline both the spreading geography of this war and the sharp limits of India’s ability to manage, let alone control, its fallout,” Raghavan told Al Jazeera.

Diplomatically, India has “objectively positioned itself on the side of the aggressors in this war,” he said, by “acts of commission — visit to Israel on the eve of war — and of omission, with not even [an] official condolence, let alone condemnation, of the assassination of the Iranian head of state.” Modi visited Israel on February 25-26.

Mallikarjun Kharge, the president of India’s opposition Congress party, said the Modi government had recklessly abdicated “India’s strategic and national interests”. And the government’s silence “demeans India’s core national interests and destroys our foreign policy, carefully and painstakingly built and followed by successive governments over the years.”

In addition, Raghavan highlighted that Modi has only criticised Iran’s retaliation, which threatens to drag the Gulf region to the brink of war.

“It is difficult not to conclude that India has drastically downgraded its interests in the relationship with Iran,” he said.

Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi has a job that’s among the most powerful and influential in Iran – and one in which the shadow of death constantly hovers.

Vahidi has taken command of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at a particularly challenging moment, amid a joint US-Israeli war on his country that has killed more than 1,000 people, devastated Iranian cities, and assassinated much of the country’s senior military leadership.

His is a dangerous job. Qassem Soleimani, the long‑time commander of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force, for example, was killed in a US drone strike in 2020 ordered by US President Donald Trump.

Mohammad Pakpour, the most recent IRGC chief, was also killed during the opening phase of the joint Israeli-US attacks on February 28. Pakpour had been appointed only after Israel killed his predecessor, Hossein Salami, during the 12-day war in June 2025.

This churn at the top of the IRGC underscores the risks attached to one of the most powerful posts in Iran’s military establishment. Now, Vahidi is tasked with a responsibility that even Soleimani, an iconic figure in Iran, never had to embrace: Leading the sword edge of Iran’s military in an actual, full-blown war.

Who is Ahmad Vahidi?

Vahidi’s appointment as the new IRGC chief isn’t surprising. In December, the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – who was killed on the opening day of the war, on February 28 – named him deputy chief. Prior to that, he served as deputy chief of Iran’s army.

A product of the IRGC from its earliest days in the late 1970s, Vahidi rose through the ranks during the 1980s, holding key positions in intelligence and in the military. Iranian state media reports that he led the elite Quds Force from 1988 to 1997.

He would hand the Quds Force’s leadership to Soleimani, who took command in 1998 and was widely credited with expanding Iran’s influence across the Middle East, until he was assassinated in 2020.

Vahidi appears to have publicly sworn himself to upholding the principles and aims of the Islamic Revolution. When he was appointed the deputy chief of the IRGC in December, he said, “Guarding the Islamic Revolution is one of the greatest virtues in the world, and the greatest evil that has been committed is opposing the Islamic system.”

In a 2025 interview with Iran’s Press TV, marking the 46th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, he described that uprising as a “burst of light” which changed the history and destiny of the region and the world.

He has shown pragmatism when it serves Tehran’s strategic goals.

In the mid‑1980s, Vahidi reportedly took part in covert contacts between Iranian representatives and intermediaries close to the administration of then-President Ronald Reagan that were linked to the broader Iran‑Contra affair, in which US officials secretly facilitated arms deliveries to Iran.

Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a Washington-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that Vahidi was “intimately familiar” with Israel and the US through his involvement in those talks.

Career in cabinet

Unlike his two predecessors, Vahidi is not solely a military figure.

He has also held senior political roles, serving as defence minister under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was appointed interior minister under the late President Ebrahim Raisi, leaving office in 2024.

Alfoneh told Al Jazeera that Vahidi is a “capable bureaucrat”, whose background makes him a “key wartime leader and an ideal chief commander of the Revolutionary Guard, which is far more than simply a military organisation.”

However, his time in the IRGC and in political office has drawn allegations which have followed him.

In the late 2000s, Interpol issued a red notice for him at the request of Argentine authorities over his alleged role in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people.

Iran denied involvement in the attack, and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the Interpol notice as “baseless”.

The US and the European Union sanctioned him over Iran’s deadly crackdown on nationwide protests following the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022. Amini died in police custody after she was arrested for not fully covering her hair. 

Mohammad Ali Shabani, the editor-in-chief of the Middle East news outlet Amwaj, said in a post on X that Pakpour and Salami, Vahidi’s predecessors, were “schoolteachers compared to this guy”.

“The man is brutal. Hardliners wasting no time filling vacancies thanks to Israel,” Shabani added.

What impact is he likely to have on the IRGC?

When the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei appointed Vahidi as the deputy of the IRGC in December, one of his primary tasks was to ready the Iranian armed forces for another possible attack from the US and Israel.

His extensive experience across Iran’s government and security institutions gives him broad influence within the state, say analysts, an advantage that is especially significant now, after the deaths of many of Iran’s senior leaders and veteran military figures.

That challenge was underscored by comments from Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who suggested in an interview with Al Jazeera that some Iranian military units have become “independent and somewhat isolated”, operating on general instructions rather than being tightly controlled by the civilian government.

Alfoneh told Al Jazeera that the former IRGC chief, Major General Mohammad-Ali Jafari, intentionally decentralised the IRGC to ensure “the organisation could survive decapitation and even the fall of the capital, Tehran”.

“Brigadier General Vahidi is well placed to coordinate the activities of such a decentralised structure with the help of key commanders and IRGC veterans, who together constitute an informal collective leadership within the organisation,” he added.

Nader Hashemi, director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University and author of Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, told Al Jazeera that Iran’s leaders are seeking “the most reliable and dependable candidate” as IRGC chief, someone who can maintain institutional continuity after the assassination of senior leaders and “inspire the rank and file to continue fighting despite overwhelming military odds”.