Trump administration denies reports that Iran captured US soldiers | Israel-Iran conflict News

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The head of Iran’s National Security Council had claimed the US was misrepresenting the captures as combat deaths.

Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s National Security Council, claimed that his country has captured United States soldiers since the outbreak of war last week.

The claims came in a post Saturday on the social media platform X, in which Larijani suggested the US was concealing the captures.

“It has been reported to me that several American soldiers have been taken prisoner,” Larijani wrote.

“But the Americans claim that they have been killed in action. Despite their futile efforts, the truth is not something they can hide for too long.”

The US military, however, quickly refuted the claims with its own statement.

“The Iranian ⁠regime is ⁠doing everything it can to peddle lies and deceive. ‌This is yet another clear example,” said US Navy Captain Tim Hawkins in response to Larijani’s post.

A spokesperson from US Central Command (CENTCOM) echoed Hawkins’s denial in a statement to Al Jazeera Arabic.

“The Iranian regime’s claims of capturing American soldiers are yet another example of its lies and deceptions,” the spokesman told Al Jazeera Arabic.

At least six members of the US armed forces have been killed since the war began on February 28, after the US and Israel launched a joint attack. The administration of President Donald Trump dubbed the military campaign “Operation Epic Fury”.

The Tasnim news agency in Iran has reported this week that an estimated 1,332 people have been killed in the war over the week since. That death toll includes approximately 180 children who died in a strike on their school in the southeastern city of Minab.

An analysis from The New York Times has suggested the school was struck by a US attack. Trump, meanwhile, blamed Iran on Saturday as he took questions from reporters aboard the presidential plane, Air Force One.

“Based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he said.

Trump spent Saturday travelling back and forth between his resorts in South Florida — where he was hosting Latin American officials — and Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the bodies of the six soldiers were transferred back to US soil.

All six soldiers were killed on March 1, one day into the war, during an Iranian drone strike on a Kuwait port.

The US military has identified the dead soldiers as Declan Cody, Jeffrey O’Brien, Cody Khork, Noah Tietjens, Nicole Amor and Robert Marzan.

Trump has yet to rule out deploying US soldiers to Iran. In an interview last Monday with The New York Post, Trump refused to commit either way.

“Every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground’. I don’t say it,” he explained.

Trump and officials like Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth have also warned that the US death toll could still rise. In a telephone call with NBC News, Trump said, “We expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.”

Still, the war has divided Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base, with some expressing frustration about Trump’s latest military campaign.