Ex-Pentagon official: US ‘intentionally targeting Iranian civilians’
Press TV – September 3, 2026
A former senior Pentagon official has said that the United States is deliberately killing civilians in Iran after a US missile strike hit a wedding ceremony in Hormozgan Province, which led to the martyrdom of five civilians, including a four-year-old child, and injured more than 70 others.
Wes J. Bryant, who served as the Pentagon’s chief of civilian harm assessments and now works as a war crimes analyst, told Al Jazeera on Thursday that the attack on the wedding in Kouhestak, Sirik County, exposes the real moral and legal standards of the War Department and the Trump administration.
“Is the US intentionally targeting civilians in Iran? It is,” Bryant said. He rejected US Central Command’s claim that American forces never attack civilians, arguing that Washington is “recklessly and negligently endangering and killing civilians” in its war against the Islamic Republic.
Bryant said every target location is recorded at multiple levels of the chain of command. Comparing Tuesday’s wedding massacre with the February US strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, he said the US military would have been able “to report within hours” whether a school or a wedding had been hit. Washington has still not produced a transparent accounting of the Minab slaughter.
No sitting American official has condemned the Kouhestak attack. Vice President JD Vance said only that Washington was “investigating” the reports while declaring himself “extremely skeptical” of Iranian accounts. CENTCOM spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins repeated the stock line that the US military “never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC.” President Donald Trump described the same night’s bombardment as “large and powerful.”
The US military struck the wedding at the home of fisherman Ali Mallahi around 8 to 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday as families gathered for his daughter’s ceremony. Hormozgan authorities named the martyred as four-year-old Amir Ali Karimi, 16-year-old Mohammad Mallahi, 43-year-old Kolsoum Mallahi and Zarkhatoun Taheri. State television later said a fifth victim, a 22-year-old woman, died in hospital; nearly 70 others were wounded, most of them women and children.
Mallahi told state television that those inside were ordinary civilians. Videos from the scene showed a collapsed roof, blood-soaked carpets and guests being treated in Minab, the same city where US missiles destroyed a primary school on the first day of the US-Zionist war.
US senator calls for a full investigation and accountability of US strike
US Senator Chris Van Hollen wrote that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth treats civilian casualties as an afterthought, cuts personnel responsible for preventing them, & boasts that there will be “no stupid rules of engagement.”
“There must be a full investigation & accountability for this strike. And we must end this disastrous war now,” he added.
Defence experts identified munition fragments consistent with a US AGM-84K SLAM-ER cruise missile. The house stood more than 100 meters from a telecommunications tower also hit in the barrage.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei called the strike a war crime and part of America’s “catalogue of atrocities” against the Iranian nation, linking it to earlier massacres in Minab, Lamerd and Qeshm.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said a power that “picks targets like Satan and kills like Satan” is Satan. The Iranian Red Crescent wrote to the International Criminal Court demanding an independent investigation. Iran’s UN mission sent a formal letter to the secretary-general and the Security Council describing the bombing of a wedding as a grave breach of international humanitarian law.
IRGC Commander Ahmad Vahidi, in a message to the victims’ families on Thursday, said the blood of those killed in Kouhestak “will never go unanswered” and would “catch up with those who ordered and carried out this heinous crime.”
He said the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and Iran’s armed forces would continue to guard the sanctity of the martyrs of the second and third US-Zionist-imposed wars, particularly the Battle of Hormuz.
Mourners buried the dead on Thursday in the coastal village, tossing petals over flag-draped coffins. Iran answered the latest US assault with missiles and drones against American bases in the region.
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