US strikes on Iran and Tehran's retaliation: the two tallies do not match

The sequence began on September 1st, when US Central Command announced it had struck military and communication sites belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Iranian territory. In the US command’s version, this was a response to attempted attacks against commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and against American military personnel deployed in the region, as reported by the Just Security roundup citing Reuters and Wall Street Journal dispatches and Centcom statements.

The following day Tehran claimed the retaliation: attacks against US targets in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq, with the claim of having killed a large number of American soldiers in Jordan. US officials denied there were any casualties, according to the account by Wikipedia’s Current events portal, which draws on Centcom statements reported by Al Jazeera, BBC News and CNN. Kuwait reported that an Iranian drone caused a fire in a residential complex in the capital.

Two casualty counts

Even on the Iranian side the numbers diverge depending on the source. Five members of the Aerospace Force of the Revolutionary Guards were reported killed in Kermanshah. Iranian sources cited by the Democracy Now roundup instead speak of at least eleven dead and dozens wounded, Havana Times reports: among them five people killed in the southern county of Sirik during a wedding ceremony. Centcom denied having struck a wedding.

A third count comes from the Arabic-language press: Al Araby Al Jadeed puts the figure at least nineteen Iranians killed in the US bombing described in its report. The three figures — five, eleven, nineteen — do not necessarily refer to the same set of targets or the same time frame, and none of them has so far been verified by a third party. This newspaper publishes them as distinct, attributed counts, not as a single tally.

The White House’s account

Donald Trump has publicly linked the strikes to an alleged Iranian attempt to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz. On September 2nd he stated that the United States had destroyed new Iranian equipment near the Strait. Iran International, citing a message from the president on Truth Social and an Iranian press roundup, reports that in the US version the September 1st strikes were also a response to the launch of eight missiles against an American military base in Jordan, and places the attack on Larak island as the end of a roughly one-month lull between the two countries.

The conflict has lasted about six months. Its most measurable effect outside the region remains the price of crude oil: according to Focus America — the only source available for this figure, without independent confirmation — Brent futures rose above $94 a barrel, with the November contract reaching as high as $96.59 on September 2nd, while the day before the war began, at the end of February, Brent had closed at $72.48. The same report includes the unclaimed attacks against two supertankers leaving the Strait, the Sidr owned by Saudi shipping company Bahri and the Senegal Prosperity owned by South Korea’s Sinokor.

What we don’t know

We do not know how many targets were hit in the September 1st strikes nor by what means. We do not know whether, and to what extent, US installations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq suffered damage: the two sides offer opposite versions and no independent documentation is available so far. We do not know whether the five victims in Sirik county were struck as part of the same attacks claimed by Centcom, which denies this. Finally, we do not know whether the attempted mining of the Strait cited by Washington has been documented beyond the presidential statements.

The figure that can be measured from outside is transit volume: the Strait of Hormuz remains the passage through which, according to the International Energy Agency cited by Focus America, nearly 34% of the world’s crude oil passed in 2025, most of it bound for Asia.