Pentagon removes four Iran war deaths from casualty list

Pentagon officials attribute exclusion to April ceasefire

The Pentagon’s official online casualty list for the Iran war now shows 14 service members killed, down from the 18 the department reported as of Wednesday, according to a New York Times report.

The four excluded troops died this past weekend. Three were killed when Iran retaliated for new U.S. strikes with an attack on a base used by U.S. forces in Jordan. The fourth died during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone at Erbil air base in Iraq.

Three military officials told the Times the Pentagon removed the four because their deaths occurred during a period in which Trump had declared a ceasefire in April. A Pentagon spokesperson attributed the reduced count to “temporary data disruptions,” the Times reported.

A separate Names of Fallen list on the Defense Casualty Analysis System website currently includes 13 service members, the Guardian reported. The Pentagon issued a press release Wednesday about the formal transfer of remains of four fallen service members back to the United States — an event Trump attended — but their names do not appear on the public casualty list.

The change came a day after Trump traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for a dignified transfer ceremony for the four fallen service members. Speaking to reporters before the ceremony, Trump said the fallen soldiers supported his argument that the war on Iran is necessary to prevent that nation from developing a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Trump posted a chart on his social media platform Wednesday comparing the Iran war death toll of 18 with those of previous U.S. wars, captioned: “These are the real facts. REPORT THEM!” The Times reported the chart misstated the number of people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At a subsequent event, Trump compared the Iran war death toll to that of Vietnam. “We were in Vietnam for 20 years, lost thousands and hundreds of thousands of lives,” Trump said. “We were in Afghanistan for years. We were in all these wars that you heard about for years and years. 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 18 … and one is too many, but it’s 18. Whereas in Vietnam, we lost 200,000.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, said on social media the reduced death toll stems from the administration’s claim that the war technically ended in June, when Trump signed a temporary ceasefire with Iran. “Let me explain this absurd ruse: The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire,” Massie wrote. He said that by going more than 90 days without congressional authorization, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “IS BREAKING THE LAW and must be held accountable.”