Trump Stranded Students in Persian Gulf With Iran War

The bombs began raining down in Iran on February 28. Israel had successfully convinced Donald Trump to launch a joint attack on the Gulf nation. There was just one thing that the White House had forgotten about: half a dozen U.S. cadets who were working just off the coast, sitting ducks in the Persian Gulf.

Five privately owned ships flying the U.S. flag were nearby carrying students from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine, and the transportation industry when the U.S. military started the war in Iran, NOTUS reported Thursday.

Unlike previous conflicts, there was no advance word or warning to the ships to evacuate, effectively trapping them as the violence began.

“Nobody told them. They were caught unawares,” one source close to the situation told NOTUS. “It was very strange that [officials] weren’t even given a whiff, weren’t even given an indication.”

The military had no plan to transport the vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, the students were forced to find safe refuge in harbors around the Gulf, living on their ships. They were evacuated a month later, three sources told NOTUS, though it is not known whether all the students have made it back to American soil.

“If they’d had even just a day’s notice, they could have gotten them out,” another person familiar with the situation told NOTUS.

But the cadets weren’t the only Americans in the region that the White House forgot.

The Trump administration also failed to properly notify regional embassy staff of the impending bloodshed that week. In an email delivered February 27, Ambassador Mike Huckabee gave nonemergency workers at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem less than 24 hours to exit Israel, informing them that anyone planning to leave the country “should do so TODAY.”

The order and its timeline were highly unusual: Embassy staff are typically provided several days’ notice in order to comply with state-mandated evacuations, with some warnings given as much as a month in advance of the anticipated departure date. By comparison, Huckabee’s 24-hour deadline was shockingly short.