America’s Iran War
casualties crept higher even as the U.S. was in the final stages of declaring a second ceasefire with Iran this weekend.
The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a second ceasefire and the eventual reopening the Strait of Hormuz under a preliminary deal scheduled to take effect on Friday. “Iran has taken a major step toward final victory,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament,
said
on Monday, one of several Iranian leaders taking a victory lap after
outlasting the Trump administration
.
Trump’s war has already killed thousands of Iranian civilians — including more than 150, most of them children – in a
strike on an elementary school
. The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 426, an almost 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. This tally, however, is missing hundreds of casualties, including two soldiers wounded in action earlier this month.
Trump Celebrates Achieving Absolutely Nothing in Iran
For months,
The Intercept has
reported
that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran War is a gross undercount, stemming from what another U.S. government official called a “
casualty cover-up
.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “
deceased, wounded, ill or injured
” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties. The true number exceeds 625.
When the first ceasefire was struck between the Trump administration and Iran, the tally of U.S. casualties was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics.
On April 21, however, the number of
wounded-in-action troops declined by 15
without public comment from the War Department, dropping the casualty total to 413. Despite repeated questions over almost two months, the Pentagon has not explained the disparity in its c
