What the Pentagon Didn’t Say About a Deadly Crash

A pair of Air Force refueling planes were flying high over Iraq two weeks into the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran. The KC-135 Stratotankers, which carry up to 200,000 pounds of jet fuel, function as flying gas stations, extending the reach of United States and allied aircraft far from air bases. On March 12, the two tankers collided. One of the planes safely landed with a badly damaged tail; the other crashed, killing six service members, constituting almost half of U.S. military fatalities in the conflict. The same day, U.S. Central Command said that the crash over Iraq’s western Anbar province had occurred in “friendly airspace” and had not been caused by hostile fire.

Initial intelligence reports told a different story. They indicated that the U.S. government had detected anti-aircraft fire by Iran-backed militias in the area around the time of the collision and that the pilots may have been forced to take evasive actions. The reports, which haven’t been previously made public, were described to us by two current officials and one former official. But Centcom’s leaders, citing different, more highly classified information, were convinced that those initial reports were mistaken. Militias had never fired surface-to-air missiles that could have threatened the aircraft, according to their assessment. The initial reports may have picked up instead on launches of missiles aimed at ground targets. That’s why the Pentagon statement asserted that no hostile fire was involved and that the skies were friendly. An Air Force–led investigation is expected to conclude that the disaster was an “avoidable mishap” by pilots operating in congested airspace, military officials told us.

Centcom’s quick and definitive public assessment of the incident, despite intelligence suggesting a more complicated picture, fits a Trump-administration pattern of omitting from its public statements important details about the conduct of the war. Senior officials have trumpeted military successes—two days before the crash, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the U.S. had “total air dominance”—and have downplayed the resilience of Iranian forces and their armed proxy groups across the Middle East.

The contrasting accounts of what preceded the crash point to the confusion of a crowded battlefield, as well as to the serious threat that Iran’s proxies in neighboring Iraq pose to the U.S. and Israeli war effort 23 years after President George W. Bush ordered Iraq’s invasion in pursuit of Saddam Hussein. President Trump said within hours of the start of the Iran war that one of his goals was to “ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.”

But those groups remain a potent force: Iran-sponsored militias have pounded U.S. facilities across Iraq with relentless rocket and drone attacks since the war began, forcing a near-total evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Iran’s proxies in Iraq also possess advanced arsenals, including ballistic missiles and anti-aircraft weapons. Early in the conflict, one official said, U.S. intelligence indicated that a refueling tanker narrowly avoided a militia missile in the same area of western Iraq where the deadly collision occurred. A Centcom spokesperson disputed that account, saying it had no indication of such an incident.

Those killed in the March 12 crash include three active-duty airmen from the 6th Air Refueling Wing based in Tampa, Florida, and three National Guard airmen from the Ohio Air National Guard’s 121st Air Refueling Wing. A Pentagon official declined to comment, saying that providing details before the Air Force probe is complete would be premature. The official, like others we interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. A family member of one of the service members who was killed recently told us that the Pentagon relayed to him that the incident was under investigation but that it has not provided any more information since.

Kataib Hezbollah, which has been designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group since 2009, is the most powerful of the Iraqi militias equipped, trained, and funded by Iran. It’s the group that some of the early intelligence suggested had been targeting the U.S. tankers.

The group has a history of launching attacks on U.S. assets and allied targets across the Middle East. U.S. officials blamed it for the recent kidnapping of the American freelance journalist Shelly Kittleson in Baghdad. (She was released a week later.) Federal prosecutors also recently charged Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an alleged senior member of Kataib Hezbollah, with involvement in at least 18 attacks or attempted attacks in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Two senior Iraqi officials told us that Kataib Hezbollah has an arsenal of advanced weapons, including ballistic missiles, and has begun manufacturing its own missiles and drones, as do Iran-linked militia groups in Lebanon and Yemen.

Unlike in previous American wars, when the Pentagon allowed journalists to witness the wars alongside deployed forces, details about the Iran war have come almost exclusively from the top—and have been uniformly positive. Hegseth and Caine have held a number of Pentagon press briefings in which they have focused on the degradation of Iranian forces and missile capabilities as well as the overall number of targets hit—more than 13,000 inside Iran before the cease-fire kicked in.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Centcom, has also participated, and last week he was on Capitol Hill, where he was pressed by lawmakers about the war’s civilian casualties. He said that Centcom was investigating one incident, the bombing of a school in southern Iran on the war’s first day, which killed about 170 people, in an apparently errant U.S. strike. But Airwars, a watchdog group that has worked closely with Centcom in the past, has identified some 300 incidents in the Iran war that involved civilian casualties that the group claims merit investigation. Whether those incidents involved U.S. or Israeli strikes is unclear. During his congressional testimony, Cooper said there were initial investigations into allegations of civilian casualties, but those have not yet found any U.S. involvement. Centcom declined to comment further.

Despite Hegseth’s claims about America’s air dominance, the war has thrust American pilots into dangerous airspace over Iran. Iranian forces have shot down an American F-15E Strike Eagle and an A-10 Warthog. They have also damaged a F-35 stealth fighter jet, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing. After mounting major rescue operations, the Pentagon was able to safely recover the F-15 and A-10 aircrews.

Much about the March 12 incident in which the refueling tanker went down remains unknown. Soon after the crash, a coalition of Iran-backed Iraqi-militia groups known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq—which includes Kataib Hezbollah—claimed responsibility, saying that it had used “appropriate weaponry” to shoot down the tanker “in defense of our country’s sovereignty and its airspace violated by the aircraft of the occupation forces.” The coalition also claimed responsibility for damaging the second aircraft. American officials have dismissed those assertions as disinformation.

One of the U.S. officials we spoke with said that the pair of tankers was on a mission that involved refueling Israeli aircraft. Both Centcom and the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment. Iraqi officials described the tanker crash as an accident. One said the U.S. government asked members of Iraq’s elite Counter Terrorism Service to help retrieve the fallen airmen. Centcom declined to comment on that too.