By Staff Writer
The US military said that Iran helped to kill 608 U.S. service members in Iraq since 2003, according to recently declassified reports.
On Tuesday, Brian Hook, US Special Representative for Iran, said: “In Iraq, I can announce today, based on declassified U.S. military reports, that Iran is responsible for the deaths of at least 608 American service members.”
This is roughly 17% of all deaths of 4,400 US troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 but does not take into account the many thousands of Iraqis killed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s (IRGC) proxies.
The real number of US personnel killed in Iraq by Iran – mainly through the Regime’s supply of explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) to Shiite militias – has been a contentious issue for years, with the Pentagon classifying the information and previously estimating around 500 deaths directly attributed to Iran.
In 2015, during two separate Senate Armed Services Committee Hearings Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said the number was 500.
Dunford said: “We were not always able to attribute the casualties that we had to Iranian activity, although many times we suspected it was Iranian activity, even though we did not necessarily have the forensics to support that.”
While later that year, US Central Command spokeswoman Maj. Genieve David said: “It is important to understand that the CENTCOM statistics on EFP [explosively formed penetrator] detonations are a subset of all the Iranian activities estimated to have killed approximately 500 U.S. troops in Iraq during OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom].”
The number revealed this week is over 100 deaths higher than the previous estimate.
However, Hook also noted that one year on from Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the US is going after Iran harder than ever before, with the designation of over 970 Iranian entities and individuals, levying of sanctions against over 70 financial institutions linked to Iran, targeting of Iran’s oil shipping networks that were funding Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, and warning over 50 countries against doing business in Iran.
Hook said: “Our sanctions have targeted a range of threats, especially Iran’s support of terrorism, missile proliferation, its nuclear program, human rights abuses, and others.”
He continued: “As we have done from the start, we will continue to call on all nations to join us in restoring the basic demands on Iran to behave like a peaceful nation. This includes ending its pursuit of nuclear weapons, stop testing and proliferating ballistic missiles, stop sponsoring terrorist proxies, and halt the arbitrary detention of dual citizens.”