The Last American Vagabond - The U.S. Exposed For Covering Up Soldier Casualties In Iran War

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

In this edition of Foreign Policy with Robert Inlakesh, definitive evidence emerges demonstrating that the US government is covering up and lying about soldier casualties in the Iran war. Yet the reason they are lying about this is an even bigger story in and of itself.Bitcoin Donations Are Appreciated:www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bitcoin-donation(3FSozj9gQ1UniHvEiRmkPnXzHSVMc68U9f) Get full access to The Last American Vagabond Substack at tlavagabond.substack.com/subscribe

To have dignity, to have respect, to have our human rights. The occupation is not just the soldiers, it's not just the settlements, it's everything. What will separate the condition of humanity from the barbarism of the past, which we like to think we have since changed and progressed from. That might have been the work of American imperialism and international Zionism. We've come here to investigate what this means for the people living here. It's a violation of international law. It's a war crime.

These are the real journalists achieving liberation to unite the people in a way that we've never seen before. Welcome back to another edition of foreign policy with me, Robert and Lakesh, for the Last American Vagabond. Today we're going to look at the disastrous U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and the fact that the U.S. now, we can say confidently, has been hiding its casualties, why this may be the implications of it doing as such, and where this war appears to be leading. So the first point here is that for the past few weeks, the US Trump administration has decided that it will again engage in tit for tat strikes against Iran on Iranian territory, forwarding the war goals of Israel in going after Iranian civil.

infrastructure, which in turn has meant that Iran has taken out civilian infrastructure, like power plants in Kuwait, for example. And so during this period, Sentcom had come out and said that it had accounted for all of its troops. A number of times Sentcom denied that it had lost troops in a number of Iranian ballistic missile attacks, where Iran, from their side, said that they had indeed killed U.S. soldiers. In fact, they said that they could account for every single one of their soldiers and gave the impression that there were no casualties whatsoever. That was, of course, until the Pentagon spoke to

the Washington Post and revealed that nearly 100 casualties had been inflicted. But they did add the caveat that most of them are now back to their duties. They have returned to the field. But they didn't give any specific number. The United States has admitted to four soldiers being killed amidst Iran's latest waves of retaliatory strikes. Now, the reason why this is so incredibly important to hone in on and why people are making a big deal about it is because it indicates that the Pentagon is not being transparent about the number of soldier casualties. And of course, that's for a very good reason. The US does not want to admit to all of its casualties,

because then that would mean that there would be a public backlash, and there would be repercussions that follow. Now, the US casualty figures that are publicly presented to us since the start of the war on February 28, rest between around 400 to 500 US soldiers injured to some degree or another, and about 18 in total killed. But there have been a number of questions raised around these numbers. To begin with, the intercept earlier this year actually pointed out and revealed that the US government had completely wiped off of the record 15 registered injuries. And so many, may look at this and they may pull into question what the United States government is doing with

its casualty counts, why it would just eliminate 15 injuries in such a way, and others have fired back and stated that perhaps this is simply a mishap. It's only 15. This is not a large number. And the US would never cover up the deaths of soldiers. To which we have to look at this critically and go back to our last known reference point for when the United States undoubtedly lied about its casualty figures and admitted to such later on when it comes specifically to Iran. So in the year 2020, the beginning of the year, U.S. President Donald Trump launched a series of strikes, drone strikes that killed General Qasim Soleimani of the year. the IRGC's Quds forces. So that was the top general in Iran and also alongside him,

a number of others were killed who were high-ranking officials within the Iraqi PMU, which was put together and fought and destroyed ISIS inside of Iraq. So after that, Iran decided that it would retaliate. So on January 8th, the Iranians launched a retaliatory missile strike. Now, keep in mind, this missile attack that the Iranians carried out, used between 17 to 22 missiles, according to the reports that were released about this, depending upon who you actually trust. It targeted two U.S. bases, one in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the other one, which was the main target, was the Ayn al-Assad base inside of Iraq. Not only did they only use between 17 to 22 missiles, these were older missiles. The technology was not like the technology that Iran has today. And also, they provided at the very least a 30-minute warning that that retaliatory attack was coming.

So the United States had 30 minutes to prepare. They were dealing with missiles that were not as advanced as the ones that they are dealing with today. And initially, after that attack, Donald Trump came onto public television. He gave a statement and he said that there were no injuries and no deaths, that no US soldiers were harmed in the strike. And thus, the entire incident was over. And remember that Donald Trump at the time, if you can recall what happened, Donald Trump had threatened on Twitter that he will attack over 50 different sites inside of Iran, if any U.S. soldiers are injured in an Iranian retaliatory attack, and that that would include cultural sites even, openly stating that he wants to commit a war crime. And so with that,

the U.S. president said Iran had backed down because there were no casualties. Nothing happened. Nothing was destroyed at all. Until a few days later, people started poking holes into the narrative that was presented, the images that were coming out from Eyn al-Assad base looked as if there had actually been a fair deal of destruction. Then we heard suddenly that the Pentagon was admitting to just over a dozen casualties, and then they admitted dozens more, and then another report, dozens more, until we got to the point where the United States government had admitted to a hundred and nine injuries. They called them traumatic brain injuries, that, or TBIs, which is what the official narrative now rests at. And they didn't stop at 109. At the end of February, they finally raised

that injury toll to 110, gave it a big round number. Now, there are still questions about whether there were actually deaths at Eyn al-Assad base, but that story sort of fell out of the media cycle and nobody really followed up on it afterwards. But it's important to note that between the 8th of January and late February, suddenly we've gone from no injuries to 110 injuries. So this is a case of the United States blatantly lying. And we know that they lied because, of course, the president openly said there was nothing that happened. And then they start slowly admitting to some of these casualties. Now again, what I said before has to be kept in mind. 17 to 22 missiles of the old generation of missiles that Iran had in stock.

It has better technology now since. We're fired at these targets. The U.S. had pre-warning. The U.S. got to use its air defenses, all of that. The conditions were much better. During this war, according to the figures provided by the U.S. media, these are conservative estimates, around 500 ballistic missiles of varying kinds,

many of them much more advanced than the ones that were fired at Ayn al-Assad, base in 2020 and another base in Irbil in Iraq were fired towards US forces in the region. They struck 20 US facilities across West Asia and destroyed entire bases. This is no longer in question as to whether this actually occurred and the damage was significant because we have the satellite imagery. We have video evidence and this is all in the mainstream now. Of course, the Trump administration attempted to downplay this at the time, but as the months went on after the temporary ceasefire,

we started to find out more and more about what had happened. And now the total injuries, the number of injuries that are admitted to are between 4 to 500. But just in the past two weeks of a much lower intensity of warfare, over around 100 injuries are being admitted to. And again, they're not being very clear about their casualties. We have examples of them just discarding of 15 casualties at the very least. Many people are questioning right now how many soldiers have actually died. Because, and this gets into the bigger issue here,

if that casualty toll is much higher, if the number of injuries is in the thousands, or perhaps even more than that. And the death toll is at the very least in the hundreds, which is something that right now we cannot confirm nor deny, we don't know, but that is the suspicion. Then the United States has suffered severe damage to its bases, and at this point,

its number of interceptor missiles that even exist to defend those bases, or areas where their troops have relocated to different bases in some cases, like in Bahrain, they moved many of their forces out of the bases that were almost completely destroyed or are no longer deemed usable in the way that they were before into other bases inside of the country. If that's the case, if the casualty figures were high then, much higher than were admitted, and now the U.S. doesn't have much air defense at all to guard its forces. And bear in mind here, the U.S. admits to having 50,000 soldiers in the region.

The air defense systems in Kuwait seem they appear to have been completely depleted. There's very little left, and we know that because Iranian surveillance drones are able to fly over Kuwaiti territory over their airspace and not be shot down. They can freely fly over Kuwait and back to Iranian territory. So if those figures were high before, how higher are they going to be if it continues to escalate? And then on top of that as well, if Iran's allies continue to escalate as well alongside it, and we have a much wider war. Because what we've seen Iran do, On top of hitting hangars and trying to take out aircraft and hitting housing for U.S. soldiers, which has resulted in what the U.S. has admitted to before dead amongst its service members. Iran has been going after radars. It's been going after air defense systems very heavily.

And the reason why it's been doing that during this tit for tap period is very obvious. They want to completely degrade those radar systems because even if the air defenses are dwindling, the radar systems will pick up on the Iranian missiles being fired and will give intelligence and feed that intelligence back to U.S. forces and of course the Israelis and other allies of the United States in the region and they will be able to prepare for Iran's incoming ballistic missile and drone attacks. But if those radars don't exist anymore, then they're being systematically taken out, which there's a lot of evidence that they are, then these kind of strikes that Iran are going to commit are going to be much more effective.

And that means that whatever the casualty numbers were before amongst the U.S. service members, they're going to skyrocket. So this conversation about how much the U.S. government is hiding. Because we know that U.S. President Donald Trump has no quarrel about lying when it comes to destroying Iran's navy, them having no missiles left, taking out all of their air defenses. In fact, during the war, the 40-day war earlier this year, as it's described, although many would argue that it is still an ongoing war, it's just, you know, sort of stopping and starting. But it's not at full intensity, for sure that it's been this entire war. time, but during that 40-day period, the initial 40-day period, Donald Trump had declared publicly in a speech that all of Iran's air defenses had been eliminated, that they didn't

have any air defense left. A few days later, Iran would shoot down an F-15 fighter jet. And then that issue in of itself was controversial because the story of the story of the the rescue mission really just didn't add up. The US lost lots of different aircraft attempting to do that. This is, you know, tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment, actually hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment that was lost. And it appeared as if another mission was ongoing, which may have been foiled inside of Iran. That was even a controversy. But the mere fact that an F-15 fighter jet was shot down after this shows that the president has no credibility. He just lies. Lies about everything. Lies about destroying Iran's nuclear program. Because apparently,

according to Trump, Iran's nuclear facilities at sites were completely destroyed during the 12-day war of June 2025. So if they've already destroyed all of their nuclear facilities, why do they need to go back in. Why does he need to keep repeating that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon? Because this war is being fought for Israeli interests. And even talking about those air defense systems, the fact that their stockpile is very low at this current moment, much of the U.S.'s air defenses have been transferred over to protect the Israelis. So they leave their own bases, their own service members open so they can get hit. They can bear the brunt of Iran's ballistic missile attacks, but as long as Israel is guarded, which begs the question, this administration, is it even

sovereign, or has it been completely captured? Because this war is not in the U.S. national interest. And we know at this point, we've reached this stage of the conflict where Yemen's on Sarulah government, the Yemeni armed forces, have announced that they are imposing a blockade on Saudi Arabia. And the reason why this is so incredibly significant is because Iran now has the Strait of Hormuz lockdown in a blockade, and Yemen is now blockading the 7 million barrels of oil that were actually being exported through the Red Sea by Saudi Arabia, which was allowing Saudi to somewhat circumvent having to use the strait of Hermuz. So now 7% of the global oil supply has been stripped off the market because Yemen has got into the

fight. And what's the Trump administration telling Saudi Arabia? Because Yemen was demanding that the blockade be lifted on themselves, which has been imposed since 2015. What did Trump tell the Saudis? Well, according to all the reports, he's encouraged the Saudis to go further. and to not lift the blockade on Yemen. Iran still has a lot of cards to play. And the only one that's benefiting that's sitting here and enjoying this all, and still has air defenses to defend itself, are the Israelis. Because what does it benefit the United States in striking Iranian civilian infrastructure? Nothing. Not only can the United States not take out all of Iran's civilian infrastructure, In retaliation, the Iranians are going to take out all of that civilian infrastructure

in the Arab Gulf states, like the United Arab Emirates, the Bahrainis, the Kuwaitis, and the Qataris, Saudis, all of them, they survive, they exist because of a limited number of desalination, water desalination facilities, and power plants, and they can much more easily be taken out. Iran, for example, has around 500 power plants. We're talking about deleting around a dozen of those power plants in the Persian Gulf, and this is the end of those Persian Gulf states. These are allies that the United States seeks investment from. Donald Trump bragged about trillions in his country.

investment that was coming in from these Gulf states. He personally has assets there. So the US president is willing to ignore the warnings and the assessments of his own intelligence agencies. He's willing to ignore the needs of his own people. He's willing to ignore his own personal private investments. All for Israel. And again, we had to ask the question, what exactly do they have on Trump and his administration? What is happening here? Because this is not normal. This is not normal influence campaign Like we've seen in past administrations the Israel lobby has immense power. We know that we know that they pay off members of Congress

They buy their elections in essence, but this is something quite different Trump's the only one that's actually gone from forth and taken a step to attack Iran. And now he can't even close the conflict. He has to continue it because he cannot say no to Israel. So we're going to continue to monitor this, but it is important to keep everything in mind when we go forward that we're looking at an administration that is totally captured. And that has enormous implications, not just on the region of West Asia, but on the United States itself.