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News ID: 76622
Publish Date : 26 February 2020 - 22:21

Shamkhani: U.S. Covering Up Iran Missile Attack Info

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s top national security body, has hit out at the White House for withholding information about an Iranian missile attack on a U.S. base in Iraq.
Shamkhani made the remarks in a tweet reacting to accusations by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday that the Islamic Republic may have withheld information about the spread of coronavirus inside the country.
"Pompeo’s expression of concern about what he deems to be a cover-up by #Iran over #corona comes while no exact news about the truth of #Ain al-Asad...has been published by the White House,” Shamkhani tweeted.
Iran fired a barrage of missiles at the Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq in early January, a few days after the top Iranian military commander was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq.
The U.S. military has said that some 110 U.S. soldiers were diagnosed with traumatic brain injury from the Iranian attack while Iranian military officials have said the missile strike killed several American soldiers.
President Donald Trump had initially said that no Americans were hurt in the strike.
Last week, the Pentagon gave a new tally, marking at least the sixth time U.S. officials have raised the number of U.S. troops injured in the retaliation.
One Iranian military spokesman has suggested that the traumatic brain injury is in fact a metaphor for fatalities.
The "brain injuries” description is an unusual and vague expression in common military parlance wherein all injured troops, even mild ones, are classified as being "injured”, the spokesman for the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif said last month.
The U.S. military in the past had said that it expected an increase in numbers in the weeks after the attack because symptoms could take time to manifest and troops could sometimes take longer to report them.