In a recent U.S. attack against Iran, an allegation was made by the latter that the strike had hit a wedding party in the city of Kuhestak in the country’s southern Hormozgan province, killing four and wounding 60 others. The U.S. Central Command responded that it never targets civilians, and only goes after military targets tied to the IRGC. President Donald Trump labelled the allegation as theater by the mullahs and demanded proof.
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When Vice President J. D. Vance was queried about the allegation, he underscored again that the U.S. would never target civilians, but that “sometimes things happen,” although he was skeptical of Iran’s allegation. Sadly, the deaths have now been confirmed by an internationally recognised humanitarian body.
It is interesting, however, that Tehran has been so vocal about this tragedy and the loss of life it caused. Afterall, those killed represent less than the daily average number of innocent lives the mullahs took by execution during 2025—a year witnessing a total of 2,201 deaths. But the skepticism aired by our two most senior officials was, nonetheless, warranted, due to the game often played by those charged with reporting war casualties.
Some examples, both past and present, demonstrate the games that are being played.
Russia has been far from straightforward in reporting its war casualties from the battlefields in Ukraine. It obviously is eager to downplay its military losses, so as not to cause domestic unrest. But, as those numbers have increased, Moscow has tightened up on what it releases. Its reporting, therefore, is often questionable, leaving outside experts to make a more accurate assessment. As a result, it is believed Russia is suffering at least a two-to-one casualty rate, if not higher, which it fails to report.
However, this is typical gamesmanship for Moscow. During its previous life as the Soviet Union fighting a war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), Russia sent many of its battlefield wounded to hospitals located in the countries of its Warsaw Pact alliance. While treatment was probably quicker there, it also enabled Moscow to play its out-of-sight-out-of-mind game designed to hide the real number of wounded from observation by its own people.
If we look at Israel’s current efforts to contain Hamas in Gaza, we need to understand the terrorists not only want the number of civilian losses to be released, but they want them exaggerated as well to trigger genocidal criticism of the Jewish state. But what Hamas fails to clarify is that often many of the reported civilian dead are its own terrorist members.
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A recent survey in Gaza taken by the international organization UNICEF has put the lie to another Hamas tale. As an agency of the United Nations that focuses on improving the health of children and their mothers, UNICEF was the right group to do so in getting an accurate report on this issue that was raised by Hamas’s claim that there were “mass infant deaths” and instant famines. But the survey revealed, considering the existence of Gaza’s emergency conditions, such fatalities were actually very low.
Someone who really knew how to play the casualty claim game was the late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. After U.S. aircraft bombed Tripoli on April 14, 1986, the claim was made that his adopted daughter, Hana, who was less than one-year old, had been killed in the attack. But it had never been revealed until then that the dictator even had an adopted daughter. This led to speculation of the report’s accuracy. Suspicions arose, if a little girl had been killed, whether Qaddafi had simply adopted her after her death.
Twenty years later, with Qaddafi still in power, an event was held dubbed the “Hana Festival of Freedom and Peace.” While the name suggested it was organized in memory of Hana, the truth had slipped out in a 1999 article by the Chinese Xinhua news agency. It had published a photograph that year of a teenaged Hana and her mother having lunch with South African President Nelson Mandela.
It was clear Qaddafi had only used Hana as a tool with which to curry sympathy among his people while spinning the perception of a heartless enemy.
The 1988 protests in Iran triggered between 2,800–5,000 deaths. The most recent protests may well have claimed an additional 30,000 civilian victims of state violence. It is the height of hypocrisy for Tehran—a theocracy responsible for the intentional deaths of tens of thousands of its citizens—to spotlight the accidental deaths of four of them in a Qaddafi-like effort to vilify a U.S. which is only guilty of committing an unfortunate tragedy.
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Image generated by ChatGPT.