Graves for the victims, mostly children, of a U.S. attack on a girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, February 28, 2026. Photo: AP
Above the pastel murals of trees, paintbrushes, crayons and microscopes, black smoke rises. The glass windows of the school have been blown out by the force of the blast, and its curtains hang shredded from the frames.
Against one burned-out wall, the remains of a playground lie scattered: a red plastic slide, a jumble of child-sized chairs. On an overturned bookshelf a pair of pink plastic sandals have been neatly placed, now covered in dust from the blast.
Description of Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school immediately after the U.S. attack. (From Minab school bombing: how the worst mass casualty event of the Iran war unfolded—a visual guide, The Guardian, March 3, 2026)
Searching through the rubble of the elementary school destroyed in a U.S. air strike, Minab, Iran, February 28, 2026. Photo: AP
As if to signal what the nature of their war on Iran will be, on the first day the U.S. attacked a girls’ grade school in the town of Minab in southern Iran, killing at least 175 people, mostly girls between 7 and 12 years old, along with some teachers and parents. The Guardian journalists go on to describe what they saw in a verified video:
… children’s bodies lying partly buried under the debris. In one video, a very small child’s severed arm is pulled from the rubble. Colourful backpacks covered with blood and concrete dust sit among the ruins. One girl wears a green dress with gingham patches on her pockets and the collar, her form partly obscured by a black body bag. Screams can be heard in the background.
Thus the town of Minab and its children entered the ranks of victims of U.S. capitalist-imperialist mass killings and atrocities, from Wounded Knee to Ngo Gun Ri to My Lai to the MOVE massacre, and literally hundreds more, known and unknown, around the world, stretching from the very beginnings of the U.S. to the present day. And in each of these, the imperialists have never spared children. In the last few years Israel, fully supported with massive armaments from Biden and Trump, has slaughtered 20,000 children in Gaza in what the UN called a "war on children"!
And now Minab. The bodies of these children were not yet even buried before pro-U.S. and pro-Israel forces went to work, denying and trivializing it—trying to either say it was a “tragic accident” or that the Iranian government was really responsible, or that it never happened at all! (At this point there is powerful evidence that the U.S. was responsible, though some questions still remain about whether the school was targeted intentionally or just recklessly.)
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt vaguely claimed “the Department of War is investigating…” A few days later, fascist “Secretary of War” Hegseth was asked one polite question about the “reported” attack. Similar to Leavitt, Hegseth basically waved it off: “All I can say is that we’re investigating that. We, of course, never target civilian targets.” There were no follow up questions to this blatant and easily refuted lie.
Coverage in the media has not treated this as the massive atrocity that it is.
Just imagine if the roles were reversed and a foreign power suddenly launched bombing raids on the U.S. and in the first few hours murdered over 160 school children. This would be a seismic world-changing event!
Where is the outrage?!
Classroom in the girls' school in Minab that was struck by U.S. bombs, February 28, 2026. Photo: YouTube News 4 screengrab
Put it this way: What America did in Minab in the first hours of the war was the equivalent of more than eight Sandy Hook or Uvalde school massacres. Where is the outrage?!? To quote the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian: “American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People’s Lives.”
By contrast, the deaths of six (now seven) U.S. soldiers are brought up in every report on the war on Iran. Sometimes anchors or journalists will actually say, “Six people have been killed in the war so far,” without even mentioning the 1,300-plus Iranian civilians reported to have been killed in the first week.
This is the media of the U.S. capitalist-imperialist ruling class—yes, that includes liberal media like CNN and MS-NOW—conditioning people to think that only American lives “matter,” and that the lives of a handful of Americans are worth more than those of thousands of Iranian civilians.
And this is preparing people to be complicit in even more horrendous atrocities, and goes along with the logic that any level of violence and murder is legitimate as long as Americans are not dying. Right now, millions need to refuse this complicity and fill the streets to demand this killing stop NOW. Every school, street, public institution should be roiling with outrage and anger at the outright and open murder of so many young girls with their whole lives ahead of them—blown apart by American bombs in our name!
During the 1960s, millions of people came to reject this kind of conditioning. They came to identify with the Vietnamese people being slaughtered. And they came to recognize the U.S. military as a bunch of baby killers.
And that is exactly what they are—then and now—baby killers. And then and now—it needed to be—and needs to be called out, sharply!
STOP THE U.S.-ISRAELI WAR ON IRAN!
STOP THINKING LIKE AMERICANS! START THINKING ABOUT HUMANITY!
THIS WHOLE SYSTEM IS ROTTEN AND ILLEGITIMATE. WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM!