US President Donald Trump said on Monday he would seek compensation from Iran for the deaths of US soldiers as part of any peace negotiations in a tit-for-tat demand after Tehran requested war reparations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“I see that Representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran are asking for compensation for the damage done to them during the last five-month Military Conflict (started because, THEY WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON), even though it was never mentioned in any of our negotiations or meetings!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran,” he added.
Trump said he wanted reparations not only from damages arising from the current war, but also attacks Iran is widely believed to have facilitated through allied militias on US soldiers going back more than two decades after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
Trump referenced the deaths and injuries of US soldiers from roadside bombs that Iranian General Qassem Soleimani is believed to have orchestrated. Iran began arming Shia militias with roadside bombs in the mid-2000s during the US occupation of Iraq.
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The campaign was part of Iran and the US’s battle for influence in Iraq. Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani inside Iraq in 2020, citing his role in supporting militias aligned with Tehran.
Trump’s post also cited the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole warship, but US intelligence agencies have blamed al-Qaeda for the attack, not Tehran.
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Trump also requested that Iran pay its own citizens compensation for the death of protesters at the start of the year. Trump partially justified the February 2026 US and Israeli war on Iran by citing its crackdown on protesters.
Trump said 50,000 people were killed, while an Iranian official put the number at at least 5,000 people.
It’s unclear how serious Trump is about conditioning a ceasefire on compensation for the death of US service members, let alone Iranian nationals. But his comments came after Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said Iran needed war reparations in order to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump’s rebuttal fits a pattern of him matching Iranian demands with his own.
The US president contradicted his own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in July when he said that the US could charge a toll of 20 percent in the Strait of Hormuz in return for being its “guardian”.
Rubio has insisted that any toll in the waterway is “completely illegal”.
Trump’s latest post underscores how a ceasefire extension between the two sides announced in June has effectively broken down, as Washington and Tehran look for an advantage on the battlefield.
However, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that Trump had effectively given up on his main stated objective when he started the war – ensuring a nuclear agreement with Tehran that prevents it from pursuing a path to a nuclear weapon. The report said Trump would end the war in order to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
