📽️: DropSite News
On February 28th, Minab began its morning just as it always did. The children put on their schoolbags, the teachers prepared their lessons and the parents sent their children out the door, expecting to see them again for lunch. By noon, the school had been reduced to a crater. A sequence of U.S. Tomahawk missiles struck the building, leaving almost nothing standing. At least 156 people were killed – 120 of them children. Washington referred to it as a "precision strike" while Minab describes it as a slaughter.
For two months Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain and Sayah sat with the people who had lived through the incident. They toured the ruins, which were still covered with notebooks and had burned desks. They heard parents who searched through the wreckage using their hands. They spoke to teachers who had lost all their classrooms in a matter of seconds. The message in each of their accounts was that there had been no fighters at that school: no weapons and no military presence, just children studying maths and reading.
The strike took place at the morning assembly when the courtyard was full. The first missile brought down the main hall, the second went through the playground and the third struck the exit route on which the children were running. The survivors said that the sound was one continuous scream — metal, concrete and human voices merging into a single sound.
The parents ran towards the school through clouds of dust. A few of them found their children still alive but with injuries. Many others found only bits of clothing, backpacks or shoes. One father knew it was his daughter because she always wore a bracelet. A teacher was able to recognize her students by the colours of their notebooks since their faces had disappeared.
The U.S. government has not provided anything that is even like an admission of responsibility. It has given no evidence, no apology, and no explanation with what actually took place on the ground. The officials keep repeating the same statement: "We are assessing." People who survived the attack in Minab say that they have heard this phrase before and that it always ends nowhere.
What Scahill, Hussain, and Sayah have documented is not a tragic error or confusion; it is one of the most serious U.S. war crimes since Vietnam – a deliberate attack on a civilian school during broad daylight. The survivors are aware of this, the journalists are aware of this, the world understands this and the only people who are pretending that this is not the case are those who carried out the missile strikes.
The families who talked to the reporters did so since they won't allow their children's deaths to be included in another Pentagon press release and they want the world to fully understand what took place and who was responsible.
It is their story, and they no longer need to wait for America to spin it.
