Democrats demand answers over treatment of wounded US troops after Iran strike

The Trump administration is facing growing demands to explain why wounded US soldiers went more than a week without adequate hospital care after a March drone strike in Kuwait, just days into the US-Israel war on Iran.

In a letter to the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, congressional Democrats urged the Pentagon to answer their questions – which include why the Pentagon’s public casualty count for the war with Iran briefly changed – by 12 August.

The letter, sent on Wednesday and led by the US senator Elizabeth Warren and the representative Pat Ryan, poses 23 questions to Hegseth over the 1 March strike on a US logistics hub at the port of Shuaiba, south of Kuwait City. It was first reported by the Washington Post.

A single Iranian drone evaded air defenses and hit the relocated operations center of the US army’s 103rd sustainment command, killing six reservists from Des Moines, Iowa, and wounding dozens more – the first US combat deaths of Operation Epic Fury, the war Donald Trump launched, alongside Israel, against Iran on 28 February.

The unit had asked for more medical staff and supplies before the strike and been turned down, according to reporting by the Washington Post and CBS News cited in the letter. There was no doctor on site afterward, no fixed aid station, and only one ambulance, with some of the wounded driving themselves to a hospital in Kuwait City, according to the reports. It took nine days before roughly two dozen soldiers, some still unscreened for brain injuries, were flown to the US military hospital at Landstuhl in Germany.

“Doctors told them that because they hadn’t been recorded as medical evacuees on the flight’s manifest or as seriously injured in [the defense department’s] casualty-processing database, they could only get limited treatment and had to wait in nearby barracks because the hospital was unable to admit them,” the letter states.

Soldiers later sent to Fort Hood, Texas, are said to have gone weeks without seeing a doctor able to diagnose traumatic brain injury, despite repeatedly failing post-blast cognitive tests, and families have told CBS News the US army downplayed the severity of individual wounds.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the letter.

The letter also presses Hegseth on the Pentagon’s official count of how many US service members have been killed in the war on Iran, which dropped from 18 to 14 on 23 July. The department blamed a data problem, but the lawmakers cite reporting that officials privately said four service members – three killed in Jordan and one in northern Iraq on 17 and 18 July – were dropped because their deaths came after Trump’s declared ceasefire in April, even though they died well after Trump had told Congress on 7 July that strikes on Iran had resumed.

Those four deaths, plus more than 200 wounded, have since been filed under a new “Overseas Operations” category, rather than be counted as part of Epic Fury, following an earlier episode in which about 100 troops injured in strikes on Jordan went undisclosed until reporters asked questions.

The letter also questions the independence of the US army’s internal review. One of the unit’s commanders initially assigned a mid-career officer under his own command to the inquiry, before a senior officer and US army central took over; soldiers questioned in the process came away with the impression that, as one put it, “we are investigating ourselves and found no wrongdoing”, according to the Washington Post.

It is the second time in a week that a US senator has pressed the Pentagon over the way it has conducted the war on Iran. On 24 July, Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia, demanded answers by 14 August about the pre-selected target lists used in the war’s opening strikes, after a 28 February strike on a school in Minab, Iran, killed more than 150 civilians, most of them children. Kaine said he was “deeply concerned about the inclusion of a school in Minab, Iran, on the lists of verified targets”.

In the latest letter, led by Warren and Ryan, the lawmakers point out to Hegseth that at least 18 service members have been killed and more than 620 wounded in the war overall since it began in February.

“As you and President Trump continue to risk the lives of service members in this reckless war, the American people deserve answers on whether you were adequately prepared to protect service members from Iranian attacks and get them the care they needed,” the lawmakers wrote, “and whether you will be prepared to do so if the war continues and escalates even further.”