The Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war does not include the four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend, despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday.
A review of the current list on the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website shows that, despite having been last updated on Wednesday, the number of US military personnel killed during Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon’s name for the US-Israeli war on Iran that Donald Trump launched on ۲۸ February, remains at ۱۴.
A separate Names of Fallen list on the same Pentagon casualties site currently includes just ۱۳ service members.
According to a New York Times report, the Pentagon website listed ۱۸ American service members as having been killed during the war on Iran on Wednesday, but was changed on Thursday to exclude three service members killed last Friday, Saturday and Sunday as Iran retaliated for new US strikes with an attack on a base used by US forces in Jordan. The list also excluded a fourth soldier who was killed during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone at Erbil air base in Iraq.
By Thursday, the defense department had lowered that number, reporting that ۱۴ American troops had been killed in the war.
Three military officials told the Times that “one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list … because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April”.
A Pentagon spokesperson disputed that contention, telling the Times that the decreased total of service members killed was due to “temporary data disruptions” that would be quickly fixed.
The Pentagon did not immediately return the Guardian’s request for comment.
The reported removal of the recent service members killed from the Pentagon list comes one day after Trump traveled to Dover air force base in Delaware to salute the remains of the four soldiers killed in the past week and as he continues to demand credit for the number of people killed being so much lower than in years-long conflicts like the US wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Wednesday, Trump posted a chart on his social media platform comparing the death toll of ۱۸ in his Iran war with those previous wars, which misstated the number of people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the caption: “These are the real facts. REPORT THEM!”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, on his way to what the Pentagon calls the “dignified transfer” of the killed service members’ remains, Trump claimed that the dead soldiers had supported his claim that the war on Iran is necessary to prevent that nation from developing a nuclear weapons – an effort US intelligence assessed Iran abandoned in ۲۰۰۳.
“We’re going to Dover,” Trump said, “to honor our heroes, and they’re indeed great heroes. All of them said, very strongly, that we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
At an event on Thursday, Trump again argued that the death toll from his war on Iran was low compared to that of Vietnam, the war he did not serve in as a young man.
“You know, we were in Vietnam for ۲۰ years, lost thousands and hundreds of thousands of lives,” Trump said, inflating the actual death toll among US troops of ۵۸,۲۲۰.
“We were in Afghanistan for years. We were in all these wars that you heard about for years and years,” Trump added. “Well, we’re in for four months and we – I had a very sad day yesterday. I went to Dover, four great American patriots killed. That’s ۱۸ … and one is too many, but it’s ۱۸. Whereas in Vietnam, we lost ۲۰۰,۰۰۰.”
Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman of Kentucky, suggested that the reason the Pentagon death toll for the Iran war excludes the four soldiers killed in the past week is that the Trump administration claims that the war technically ended in June, when Trump signed a temporary ceasefire with Iran over dinner at the palace of Versailles.
“Let me explain this absurd ruse: The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire,” Massie wrote on social media. “The reality: By going more than ۹۰ days without congressional authorization,” the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, “IS BREAKING THE LAW and must be held accountable”.
