The war against Iran lasted just over 15 weeks before a preliminary US-Iranian peace deal was reached this week. But the human and economic toll mounted rapidly, with consequences far beyond the region, according to the New York Times.
Facing pressure at home and abroad, President Trump announced on Monday that he and Vice President JD Vance had electronically signed a document the previous day with the Iranians formally ending the war. The conflict began on Feb 28 when the United States and Israel attacked Iran.
On Wednesday, the president signed the agreement again in France at the Palace of Versailles, where an ill-fated treaty was concluded to end World War I more than a century ago.
The costs of the war to the United States, estimated at $132 billion overall, are still being tallied as a 60-day period for further negotiations begins. Here is what we know.
About 3,500 Iranians have been killed in the war, according to an Iranian government agency. Israel says 26 Israelis have been killed. Thousands of people in both countries have been injured.
The US military says 13 of its members have been killed.
Israel renewed attacks on Lebanon on March 18 as part of the wider war, and about 3,700 people have been killed there, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Strikes, mainly by Iran, have also killed people across the Middle East, including workers from South Asian countries in the Persian Gulf.
The US military killed three Indian civilian sailors in a strike on a commercial ship near Oman, raising tensions between the United States and India.
In the deadliest known civilian casualty incident, a US missile strike demolished an Iranian school, killing at least 175 people on the first day of the war, according to Iranian officials.
Iran’s economy was already deeply troubled before the war. But now it is in free fall. Prices for food and other basic goods have surged, and daily life is a struggle.
The scale of devastation has been great, with hundreds of schools and health care facilities damaged or destroyed in the war, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, the country’s primary humanitarian relief organisation.
For US taxpayers and consumers, the cost of the war is at least $132 billion, according to Moody’s Analytics. That factors in military spending, rising energy and commodity prices and interest rates, said Mark Zandi, the company’s chief economist.
A top Pentagon official told Congress last month that the cost had risen to around $29 billion for the military. That estimate did not include the price of repairing about a dozen US bases in the region damaged by Iranian attacks.
The costs of repair and maintenance, as well as keeping carrier strike groups at sea, also need to be factored in. “It costs a lot of money to just keep everyone and all this apparatus deployed there,” said Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
She added that the replacement costs of the enormous number of munitions that the US military has expended will be much higher than the original purchasing costs.
