Former President Donald Trump in the last two months has repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail that there was an 18-month period when he was in office during which no service members died in combat in Afghanistan.
While Department of Defense data shows there was an 18-month stretch in which no U.S. service members were killed in combat in Afghanistan, Trump was not in office for all of this time.
The Republican presidential candidate originally made this claim years ago, but has recently repeated the assertion multiple times as the U.S. marked three years since the August 2021 Abbey Gate suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport. A lone ISIS-K suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghans during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan months after President Biden took office.
“When I left office, we had not lost a single service member in combat in Afghanistan in more than 18 months,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina on Aug. 23.
“We didn’t lose one person in 18 months, and then they took over that disaster,” Trump said in a campaign video posted to TikTok on Aug. 28. Trump’s voice-over played over footage of him interacting with Gold Star families during his recent controversial trip to Arlington National Cemetery, which garnered a rare rebuke from the U.S Army. The video has since garnered around 11.8 million views. The original sound on the video, which sampled a song by Bon Iver and St. Vincent, has since been removed.
According to government data from the Defense Casualty Analysis System, there was no 18-month period that occurred entirely under Trump’s presidency in which there were no deaths in combat, or “hostile” deaths, in Afghanistan.
The last service members killed in combat in Afghanistan during Trump’s tenure were Sgt. 1st Class Javier Jaguar Gutierrez and Sgt. 1st Class Antonio Rey Rodriguez, who died on Feb. 8, 2020. Later that month, Trump and the Taliban reached a deal which excluded the Afghan government that called for U.S. forces to leave the country by May 1, 2021.
Afterwards, there was a roughly 18-month stretch from March 2020 to late August 2021 during which no U.S. service members died in Afghanistan. Trump was in office for roughly 11 months of this time period, and Mr. Biden was in office for the final seven months.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request to clarify the discrepancy.
From the time Mr. Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021, there were no combat deaths reported until after U.S. forces began their withdrawal from America’s longest war, a plan set in motion by Trump before leaving office.
In the last full 18 months of Trump’s presidency, starting in July 2019, there were 12 combat deaths reported in Afghanistan. Throughout Trump’s entire term, 45 combat deaths were reported in Afghanistan.
Throughout the 20-year war in Afghanistan that began after terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, over 1,900 service members are classified as “hostile deaths” stemming from combat operations under Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. In total, 2,459 American troops were killed during the operations.