Right at the start of America’s war with Iran, something went very, very wrong.
We can say that with even more clarity as the first news team from outside Iran to reach where it happened.
You need to walk through the rubble in the wrecked classrooms of the primary school in Minab for the full enormity of the atrocity here to hit home.
The ruins of the school struck by a missile
Most of those killed in the southern Iranian city of Minab were children
You have to talk to the people who raced to the scene that morning after the missiles came in to have a sense of the utter horror and carnage that followed.
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They could not tell if they were alive or in a nightmare as they picked up the body parts of children scattered across the car park and playground.
You have to listen to a mother who could only bury part of the torso of her dead nine-year-old wrapped in a shroud because that was all that was left of him, to understand the depth of their grief.
Or stand in Minab’s new graveyard surrounded by more than 150 graves and families still mourning there every evening to realise the extent of the tragedy.
Three months after the airstrike, and night after night, parents visit the local cemetery
People gather at the ruins of the school
It was by any measure an abomination and almost certainly the work of the US military.
The missiles fired at the school on the first day of the war were US Tomahawks. Only America had been targeting numerous sites in the area that day.
Disgracefully, President Trump’s first reaction to the atrocity at Minab was an obvious falsehood. It was Iran’s fault, he said. They also use Tomahawks. But they don’t.
A preliminary US investigation is reported to have concluded this was an American mistake. But that has not been confirmed publicly. Officially, all the Trump administration has said for almost three months now is that it’s ‘under investigation’.
Past incidents of mass civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan produced a public admission of responsibility from the Americans within days, at most, a few weeks.
Whatever else the US military was targeting in the area that day, this was a primary school that had been, for more than ten years, marked clearly on maps.
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A cake is lit at the grave of one of the children who died
If it was deliberately targeted, that would be a war crime. If it was misidentified, that potentially is also a breach of the rules of war.
America’s reputation is at stake, but so are the lives of more innocent civilians in future. So far, the Pentagon appears to be foot-dragging.
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Even worse, the tragedy at Minab followed cuts by the Trump administration to just the units set up to prevent things like it from happening.
Whistleblowers had already warned the evisceration of units like the Civilian Protection Programme made this sort of mass killing more likely.
Despite all that, it’s not at all clear to what extent the missile strikes are being investigated.
If America is not prepared to learn from Minab, there is every chance of it being repeated if hostilities are resumed.
The people of Minab deserve an explanation, they’re demanding answers and justice from the Trump administration.
