The Intercept reports that the official US Department of Defense statistics may not have recorded hundreds of deaths and injuries in the war against Iran.
The US military, which has tried to hide the real figures related to the soldiers killed or injured in this war from the public using various tricks since the beginning of the war against Iran, added the names of 60 new wounded to its statistics on Monday.
With this figure, the United States has so far admitted that 776 of its soldiers have been killed and injured as a result of the war against Iran.
The addition of this figure at a time when there is currently no active exchange of fire between Iran and the United States is part of a pattern of institutionalized concealment in the US military that has been particularly evident during several conflicts with Iran.
In this regard, today, Tuesday, the Intercept, which has been seriously following the Pentagon’s cover-ups in the war against Iran, has uncovered new documents about the Trump administration’s cover-ups in this regard.
The media outlet says that after reviewing government contract documents, it has concluded that, at the same time as the recent increase in the number of American military casualties, the Pentagon has been quietly finding contractors to provide services related to the handling of military casualties and bodies.
In an interview with The Intercept, a US government official described the increase of 60 people injured last week as a “numbers game” and accused the Pentagon of delaying the announcement of the real number of casualties for weeks.
The official told The Intercept: “They wanted to take the pressure off themselves after the really devastating attacks.”
He was referring to Iran’s attacks last month on US bases across the region, which began after the Trump administration violated a ceasefire agreement.
Several US media outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have reported that the attacks exposed the serious vulnerability of US forces to Iranian attacks.
The Intercept says the office of US Secretary of Defense Pete Hexath did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Among the questions the Intercept sought from the Pentagon was when and where exactly the 60 new injuries occurred.
In recent weeks, US media outlets have exposed one of the US government’s tricks to downplay or cover up military casualties.
According to the revelations, the United States is now reporting its military casualties in two new systems.
Since the start of the US-Iran war, the US Department of Defense has been publishing official casualty figures on the Defense Casualty Analysis System website, known as DCAS.
The system records the number of military personnel “killed, wounded, sick or injured” for Congress and the White House.
However, the Pentagon records the number of troops killed in the conflict between Iran and the US that followed the collapse of the agreement on a separate page called “Overseas Operations.”
According to DCAS, including casualties from “Operation Epic Fury” – the US military’s official title for the early months of the Iran-Iraq war – 18 US service members have been killed and 758 wounded since the war began on March 25.
But this official figure, according to The Intercept, is significantly lower than the actual number of dead and wounded in the war.
