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The Pentagon has quietly added one more U.S. fatality to its casualty counts amid the war on Iran, bringing the officially reported death toll to 19 people — while reports have suggested that the U.S. is covering up several more deaths.
Department of Defense officials added the death to its public casualty database on Monday, but, as The Washington Post noted, had not announced the death publicly as of Tuesday.
Reporters have confirmed the identity of the Army member as Bianca C. Wilkerson, a 37-year-old from Norfolk, Virginia who was deployed to Doha, Qatar, in support of the operations related to the Iran war. She reportedly died on Friday from a “medical incident” while on a non-combat flight to Saudi Arabia.
Wilkerson’s death is classified under the vague category of “Overseas Operations,” which the Pentagon has used since July, when the Trump administration claimed that Operation Epic Fury was over despite the war not being over. The Trump administration has been attempting to manipulate reporting on and wording surrounding the war in order to avoid obtaining congressional approval.
These distinctions are important in classifying deaths, however, as they can lead to different benefits for families of those killed; a widow of an Air Force member who was killed in March said earlier this month that she was denied death-related benefits from the military because an officer told her “we have not declared war.” After her story went viral, the Air Force said it was reviewing her case, and the widow later said her situation was resolved.
The way these casualties are filed by the Pentagon can also affect public perception of the war by making it harder to understand casualty counts.
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“They want to tell you that the war is going fine, and they want to believe that, and it’s going to plan, and sometimes they’re able to say that because they’re not counting the casualties that are in the rear,” said Neta Crawford, co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, to Task & Purpose. “It’s politically useful.”
Wilkerson’s death came on the same day that The Washington Post reported that the U.S. has not reported four to five more deaths that are related to the war on Iran, according to six U.S. officials who are familiar with the data.
It’s unclear if those officials were counting Wilkerson’s death in the undisclosed total. The Post reported that, as of Friday, the true death toll on the U.S. side was 22 or 23 people. Another three U.S. contractors in the region have also died since the U.S. and Israel launched the war.
The total reported U.S. casualties amid the war is over 850, with over 66 wounded this month, according to The Intercept, which has also previously noted the Pentagon’s strange casualty reporting practices amid the war. More than half of those casualties have occurred during the “Overseas Operation” period of the war, starting in July.
As of June, over 3,400 civilians in Iran had been killed in the war, with over 33,000 injured, according to UN figures.
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