The Pentagon, the US defence department, has revised the number of deaths of US military personnel linked to the Iran war upwards to 21. The number of US service members wounded in the war has risen to 865. The figures became public on 10 October after the Pentagon’s public casualty database was updated on 9 October.
The revised count newly includes two service members whose deaths were not caused directly by combat wounds. One is Major Sorffly Davius of the New York Army National Guard, who died in a medical emergency while on duty in Kuwait on 6 March. The other is an enlisted member of the navy whose death in September was by suicide. That person has not been identified.
Why were the deaths left out before?
The Pentagon’s official casualty database is called the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS). After the revision, the total of deaths linked to the Iran war in the system is 21.
The Washington Post reported last month that the true number might be higher than the deaths being published in the official database. It based its report on information from six US officials. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth at the time called the report “completely false”. The Pentagon’s official count was later revised.
According to the report, before the 9 October update the DCAS data had last been revised on 29 September. The newly added deaths have therefore raised questions about the accuracy of the official count and the process of updating it.
865 wounded, and a change in the count
According to the Pentagon’s updated data, 865 US service members have been wounded in operations linked to the Iran war. But there has also been controversy before over how the wounded and dead of the war are being classified.
Fighting between the United States and Iran continued even after President Donald Trump announced earlier this year that Operation Epic Fury had ended. The Pentagon then placed some later casualties in a separate category named Overseas Contingency Operations, not under the name of the earlier operation.
This made it hard for the public, and for lawmakers too, to assess the overall human cost of the war. The change in classification has complicated any understanding of how complete the official count is.
22 deaths in the Middle East, one not linked to the Iran war
The Pentagon has acknowledged the death of one more US soldier. Sergeant Devin A Seibel died in a training accident in Iraq in May. His death is not related to the military operation against Iran; in the official count he is listed under the long-running operation against Islamic State.
With this death, the total number of US military deaths in the Middle East since the operation against Iran began on 28 February is 22. That figure includes the 21 linked to the Iran war and the soldier killed in the separate training accident. Treating war-related deaths and all military deaths in the region in that period as the same count could therefore cause confusion.
Criticism from lawmakers
After the revision, Adam Smith and Chrissy Houlahan, two senior Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee, welcomed the correction. They also said it was embarrassing for the military establishment that Congress had to step in to have an error of this size corrected.
The Pentagon said in a statement that it is committed to publishing casualty information on service members transparently and accurately. It said a new category named “pending adjudication” is being added to review unresolved cases. This will allow deaths or classifications on which no final decision has been reached to be reviewed separately.
Why transparency matters
A count of war casualties is not only a statistic. It is an important basis for the safety of service members, the rights of their families, government accountability and any assessment of the war’s overall effect. Where there are inconsistencies in the cause of death, the number of wounded and the classification of casualties under different operations, the true human cost of a war becomes hard to assess.
The revision of the official count of deaths linked to the Iran war is therefore not only a matter of a higher number; it has also started a fresh discussion of how military casualty data is collected, classified and published. The Pentagon has said it will take steps to revise the count further, so the official figures may change again as new information is added.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report