how many us soldiers died in afghanistan

Between 2001 and the end of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan in 2021, about 2,400–2,460 U.S. service members were killed in the Afghanistan war.

Quick Scoop

• Most detailed official tallies put the number of U.S. military deaths in and directly around Afghanistan at just under 2,400.

• A commonly cited range, depending on whether you include deaths supporting the mission in nearby countries, is around 2,400–2,460 U.S. troops.

• In addition to uniformed military, thousands of U.S. contractors and civilians working with the Department of Defense were also killed.

• Tens of thousands of Afghans—civilians, Afghan security forces, and insurgents—also lost their lives, showing that the human cost of the war was far wider than U.S. troop numbers alone.

A brief human note

When people say “over two thousand U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan,” they are summing up almost 20 years of deployments, firefights, roadside bombs, aircraft crashes, and other incidents that ended individual lives and changed families forever. Each number hides a story: someone who didn’t come home, and a circle of people—parents, partners, children, friends—who carry that absence forward.

These figures are not just statistics; they mark real human losses spread across two decades of war.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.