WASH­ING­TON — Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump said yes­ter­day that the Unit­ed States car­ried out a strike in the south­ern Caribbean against a drug-car­ry­ing ves­sel that de­part­ed from Venezuela and was op­er­at­ed by the Tren de Aragua gang.

He said in a so­cial me­dia post­ing that 11 peo­ple were killed in the rare US mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion in the Amer­i­c­as, a dra­mat­ic es­ca­la­tion in the Re­pub­li­can ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ef­fort to stem the flow of nar­cotics from Latin Amer­i­ca. Trump al­so post­ed a short video clip of a small ves­sel ap­pear­ing to ex­plode in flames.

“The strike oc­curred while the ter­ror­ists were at sea in in­ter­na­tion­al wa­ters trans­port­ing il­le­gal nar­cotics, head­ing to the Unit­ed States,” Trump said on Truth So­cial.