Over two hundred children and their teachers were beginning their week at Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab on February 28 when an American Tomahawk missile struck. The principal gathered the surviving children into the prayer room and began calling their parents. Then came a second strike, directly targeting this refuge. According to eyewitness accounts verified by satellite analysis, a third strike followed. The attack was a “triple tap” — three consecutive strikes designed to maximize casualties as bystanders and emergency workers rush to help victims of the previous strikes. Most of the 175 murdered that day were children between the ages of 7 and 12.
In the hours after the strike, President Trump said that “freedom for the Iranian people” was a primary aim of the war. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former dictator of Iran and the leader of the far-right movement, celebrated the attacks as “the help that the United States President had promised.”
More than a month of mass casualties and unrelenting attacks on civilian infrastructure, Trump’s explicit threats of genocide in the last few days confirm what we already knew: the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked aggression has never had anything to do with “helping” Iranians. It is a war on the Iranian people, Iranian sovereignty, and Iranian civilization itself.
In just the first thirty days of the war, the US and Israel have bombed residential buildings, schools, hospitals, critical energy and water infrastructure, historical heritage sites, civilian airports, roads, bridges, factories, universities, sports arenas, and Red Crescent facilities. More than 3,500 Iranians have been murdered. 3.2 million people remain internally displaced. The attacks have damaged over 87,000 civilian locations, including 61,000 homes, 275 medical centers, and nearly 500 schools. According to the Iranian Ministry of Education, over 243 students have been killed, some of preschool age.
On March 8, Israel bombed oil depots in northern Tehran; the resulting fires pumped untold quantities of toxic hydrocarbon compounds, sulphur, and nitrogen oxides into the air. A thick black haze loomed over Tehran the next day, as soot coated the city and acid rain formed in the clouds. Observers said that, “The sun did not rise over Tehran” that morning. Trump’s rhetoric crossed into explicit threats of genocidal annihilation against the very Iranian people he had claimed to help. “A whole civilization,” wrote Trump, “will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
The current stage of escalation reflects a new phase of imperialism in the region. In his March 2 press briefing, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth summed up the American approach: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.” Gone is the pretense that America fights benevolent wars in the name of humanitarian intervention and international law. Instead, Netanyahu and Trump, along with their cabinets of sycophants, make open calls for land theft, looting, and barbaric violence. The imperial order has aligned in a naked grab to control oil, with the bloody petrodollar securing US hegemony by suffocating sovereign development and self-determination in the region.
If Secretary Hegseth’s genocidal screed helps set the record straight on America’s longstanding ploy to cloak imperial theft and deadly intervention in the language of spreading democracy and freedom, Senator Lindsey Graham’s enthusiastic endorsement of the war makes clear its real aims. While the world watched horrified as apocalyptic plumes of smoke smothered the sky over Tehran, Graham took to social media to criticize Israel for attacking oil infrastructure he hopes the US will soon appropriate. In language reminiscent of 19th century European colonialism, he told Fox News viewers that “When this regime goes down, we’re gonna have a new Mid-East, we’re gonna make a ton of money…Venezuela and Iran have 31 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We’re gonna have a partnership with 31 percent of the known reserves.”
This so-called dawn of a “new mid-East” rests on US efforts to demilitarize and de-develop all opposition to its expanding settler-colony of Israel, with renewed genocidal bombardment of Lebanon and Gaza, and continued frontier violence in the West Bank. The role being played by the complicit and normalizing Arab states in the Gulf is an indication of what US imperialism hopes to inflict on the rest of the Arab-Iranian region: to lay down all weapons in the face of an expansionist settler-colony, to open the door to capitalist extraction, and to become a site open to any and all penetration by US-Israeli military bases.
Over the last decade, the US-Israeli media apparatus has been carefully activating a subset of Iranian diaspora, who are today being weaponized in service of this war. Trump used them to connect the war to January’s protests in Iran; the domestic struggles of Iranians are cynically invoked as justification for murdering Iranians.
It is essential for Iranians to raise their voices, both from within Iran and in the diaspora, and set the record straight on what the past month has made clear to all. We must resist narratives of “Persian” exceptionalism rampant in our communities in order to recognize the unity of struggle throughout West Asia. The current aggression against Iran is just one node in a decades-long war. Its aim is not only to shatter Iranian society, but also weaken resistance to imperialism in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and across the region, opening new frontiers for the decaying American empire and enabling Israel to realize its Messianic fantasies of dominance.
Iranians recognize that the single greatest obstacle to their freedom, development, and self-determination, and to that of all people of the region is this imperial war of aggression. Just as they have for centuries, Iranians are resisting, heroically defending their land and their futures. The steadfastness and spirit of resistance that has kept Iranian civilization living and thriving for millennia came to the fore in moving scenes in the final hours before Trump’s genocidal deadline.
In response to the threat to destroy all of Iran’s energy infrastructure, Iranians gathered together and, showing bravery that inspired people around the world, formed human chains around their power plants in order to protect them. In these final hours, Iranian musician and dissident Ali Ghamsari sat alone right in front of a power plant under threat of bombardment, and played the tar, a testament to the resilience of an ancient culture in the face of annihilation. Many Iranians are also recognizing the urgency of unity across the region. In the aftermath of the so-called “ceasefire,” the fate of which remains unknown, thousands of Iranians gathered in Enghelab Square in Tehran chanting: “A ceasefire without Lebanon is a Betrayal of Islam.”
As Iranians inside Iran stand strong, those of us residing in the imperial core have a moral obligation to them to do everything in our power to stop the bombs from dropping on their heads, and to continue resisting the decades-long campaign of imperial aggression — be it in the form of war, sanctions, assassinations, infiltration, or any other form of intervention.
We, Iranians of differing political views and of all walks of life living in the diaspora, refuse to play the role of collaborators in the destruction of our homeland and our people, and affirm our solidarity with our siblings inside Iran against our common enemies. We recognize that the spectacle of an overwhelmingly pro-war and pro-imperial Iranian diaspora is a manufactured myth, designed to impose silence on those millions of Iranians who are now globalizing the defense of their people.
It is our compatriots’ right to determine their own future; it is our responsibility to make sure they have a chance to do so, free from the malign influences of empire.
This piece appears in the twenty-first issue of The New York War Crimes.