The Pentagon’s official online list of US service members killed in the ongoing Iran war currently excludes four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the past weekend. Their names were included in a Pentagon press release on Wednesday, which announced the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States.

A review of the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website shows that, despite being 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 launched by Donald Trump on February 28—remains at 14. A separate "Names of Fallen" list on the same site includes just 13 service members.

According to a New York Times report, the Pentagon website had listed 18 American service members as killed on Wednesday but was changed on Thursday to exclude three soldiers who died last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. These deaths occurred as Iran retaliated for new US strikes with an attack on a base used by US forces in Jordan. The list also excludes a fourth soldier killed during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone at Erbil air base in Iraq.

By Thursday, the Defense Department officially reported that 14 American troops had been killed in the war. Three military officials told the Times that the Trump administration removed the four recent deaths from the list because they occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in April.

The removal of these recent casualties from the Pentagon list came one day after Trump traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to salute the remains of the four soldiers. Trump has continued to emphasize the relatively low death toll in the Iran war compared to previous US conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, Trump posted a chart on his social media platform comparing the death toll of 18 in the Iran war with those of previous wars. However, the chart misstated the number of US deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump also inflated the actual US troop death toll in Vietnam, which stands at 58,220.

Sources