The US bombed Iran’s nuclear sites Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan on June 22.

United States President Donald Trump has insisted that the strikes on several of Iran’s nuclear sites last week “completely destroyed” the facilities, rejecting US media reports citing a Pentagon assessment that the attacks only set Tehran’s nuclear programme back by a few months.

An initial intelligence evaluation suggested that the US bombardment failed to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN reported on Tuesday, citing officials familiar with the military intelligence report from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Two people familiar with the assessment had told CNN that Iran’s “enriched uranium was not destroyed” and the centrifuges were “largely intact”.

Another source told the US broadcaster that, according to the assessment, enriched uranium had been moved before the US strikes on Sunday.

Trump has maintained that the US strikes destroyed nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

“Fake news CNN, together with the failing New York Times, have teamed up in an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform.

“The nuclear sites in Iran are completely destroyed!” he wrote.

When reporters asked him about Iran rebuilding its nuclear programme on Tuesday, Trump said: “That place is under rock. That place is demolished.”

The White House said the intelligence assessment was “flat-out wrong”.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement: “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, also dismissed the intelligence report.

“All three of those had most, if not all, the centrifuges damaged or destroyed in a way that it will be almost impossible for them to resurrect that programme,” Witkoff told Fox News on Monday night.

“In my view, and in many other experts’ views who have seen the raw data, it will take a period of years.”

Witkoff also called the leaking of the report “treasonous”.

“It ought to be investigated. And whoever did it, whoever is responsible for it, should be held accountable,” he added.

Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi said an information war is under way.

“There are clearly figures in Washington who are very keen to leak a very preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency bombing assessment,” he said.

He noted that White House reporters received a press statement, saying the “leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear programme”.

“This is the first moment we are seeing, post-bombing, of the information landscape and how this information will be used and what effect it might have on Donald Trump going forward,” Rattansi said.

Source:

Al Jazeera and news agencies