Who Bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh School?

February 28 began with the bombing of a school, the same day the U.S. and Israel launched their attack on Iran. The airstrike left 180 people dead at a girls’ primary school in Minab, a city of 75,000 people in the south of the country, near the Strait of Hormuz, about 1,000 kilometers from the capital. Neither side in the war has claimed responsibility for the attack so far.

Unlike in the West, Saturday is the first working day of the week in Iran, the day when classes resume and schools are full. One hundred and sixty-eight girls were killed, most of them between the ages of 7 and 12, in addition to education workers. The attack was so brutal that it left more dead than wounded. The explosions turned the Shajareh Tayyebeh School (Virtuous Tree, in Portuguese) into a crowd of panicked people searching through the rubble beneath columns of smoke.

Despite the difficulty of investigating the attack, given the impossibility of accessing the weapon fragments and the restrictions placed on foreign journalists’ access to the site, the hypothesis that the United States was responsible for the attack is gaining ground in the international press. The Times and The New York Times have gathered evidence through satellite images and videos. The BBC has also received reports that three missile attacks struck the school. The Washington Post reported that the school building was on a list of U.S. targets, according to several sources.

The United States prides itself on having the most technologically advanced armed forces in the world. Its intelligence services, such as the CIA, are portrayed as highly efficient, capable of tracking the movements of heavily protected Iranian leaders for months and bombing targets with extreme precision. Did they really fail to notice on the very first day of airstrikes that one of the buildings they bombed was surrounded by courtyards and a soccer field where hundreds of uniformed children come and go every day?

The press investigation

According to journalists, the school building was severely damaged at the same time as the bombing of a naval complex of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps within a radius of 500 meters. General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press conference that U.S. forces carried out attacks in southern Iran at that exact time. Four buildings inside the naval base were destroyed, and two others showed signs of impact on their roofs. Videos recorded by witnesses and by Iranian human rights groups, shared on social media about an hour after the events, showed the school heavily damaged and surrounded by smoke. At the same press conference, General Caine said that Israeli forces were operating in other areas farther north.

On the same day, rumors circulated online suggesting that an Iranian rocket fired by mistake had hit the school. Trump stated that Iran might be responsible, but when asked why no one in his own government appeared to support this claim, he replied: “I simply don’t know enough about it.” On another day, he commented, “Based on what I’ve seen, this was done by Iran.”

However, The Times and other analysts questioned this claim, arguing that a single stray missile would not have simultaneously caused such precise and targeted damage to several buildings at the nearby naval base. Days before, images analyzed by specialists from the newspapers revealed a U.S. Tomahawk missile striking buildings near the school in Minab. Neither Iran nor Israel possesses this technology. Only the United States does.

Investigators also found that, according to satellite images from 2013, the school building had previously been part of the naval base of the Revolutionary Guard. Pathways connected the military installations to the school. However, in September 2016, the building was separated by a barrier and was no longer connected to the naval base.

The New York Times interviewed Wes J. Bryant,  a security analyst and critic of the Trump administration who served in the U.S. Air Force and worked as a civilian casualty adviser at the Pentagon. Bryant assessed that all the buildings, including the school, were struck by highly destructive and precise strikes. However, when asked at a press conference whether the United States had attacked the school, press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded: “Not that we know of (…) The Department of Defense is investigating the matter.”

A letter signed by 46 Democratic senators is pressuring the U.S. government to conduct a “swift and thorough investigation” into the attack on the school and other operations that caused civilian casualties. Senator John Kennedy was the first Republican lawmaker to acknowledge possible responsibility for the bombing, CNN reported: “It was terrible. We made a mistake (…)”

Appeals to international law?

International humanitarian law has been invoked around the world, including by sectors of the bourgeoisie within the United States. These conventions are supposed to limit the effects of war on civilians. They establish that military operations must do everything possible, taking all necessary precautions, to verify that the objectives being attacked are not civilian targets. But this denunciation has been ineffective.

The memory of U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of Israel’s actions in Gaza, shows that in practice these norms are often subordinated to the strategy of imperialism. In contexts of military escalation, attacks on civilians increase.

In Iraq, in 2003, we saw repeated war crimes, for example, the bombing of Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, an institution with more than 800 years of history. Who was held responsible and punished? Today, UNICEF reports that another 12 children were killed in five different schools in Iran during a single week of war. Who will investigate these crimes as well?

How will the investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense itself into the Shajareh Tayyebeh School proceed? Will they investigate themselves? The UN, another institution serving imperialism, has also announced a parallel investigation. But who believes that this time there will be punishment for those responsible, beyond formal statements and cold diplomatic reports?

The responsible are those who profit from war

In two years of massacre in Gaza, one child was killed every 52 minutes. Killing civilians, killing children, bombing schools means attacking the future of a people. This is clearly an imperialist war against the peoples of the Middle East. Trump and Netanyahu appear today as the greatest terrorists, responsible for the escalation of violence in the world.

Faced with the crisis of the capitalist system, in which monopoly capital cannot maintain its rates of profit solely through “normal” economic processes, that is, through the exploitation of labor power, militarism, the plunder of countries dominated by capital, and the looting of their natural resources become systematic attempts to stabilize the system. This is the core of imperialist policy. Therefore, even when modern wars appear as moral accidents or as excesses of one or another ruler, at their root, they are expressions of the struggle of finance capital for new markets, including the destruction of factories and cities so that they may later be rebuilt.

Bourgeois groups profit from barbarism, corporations are interested in profits from war, and oligarchies are interested in keeping their power. Workers have no interest in imperialist wars. Students and workers are victims of these policies, and all international solidarity is necessary.

As our political statement affirmed, the attack by the United States and Israel against Iran is “an aggression by the main imperialist country in the world, together with its bridgehead in the Middle East, Israeli Zionism, against an oppressed country.” Communists stand unconditionally in defense of Iranian workers and youth against the ongoing imperialist attack. At the same time, we do not support the regime of the Iranian ayatollahs.

Take part in the Meeting Against Imperialism and Its Wars

We invite all those who follow our work to register for the National Meeting Against Imperialism and Its Wars, which will take place on April 18 in São Paulo and also online (register here). At this meeting, we will discuss the need for self-organization of the working class and its youth worldwide, as well as the building of independent instruments of struggle and resistance to put an end to capitalism, imperialism, and the wars that afflict humanity.