February 28, 2026: Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, where a US strike killed over 100 children
As in June, the USA went through the motions of negotiating while preparing for a criminal war – I use that term advisedly and literally – which materialised yesterday, the last day of February 2026, to end weeks of speculation.
Day one saw a direct hit on a school in southern Iran. Says the Guardian:
Iran’s parents had just dropped their children off for class on Saturday morning when they found themselves racing back to school gates, as bombs began to fall … in a joint US-Israel attack. At one elementary school they arrived to find devastation. At least 100 children had been killed in the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran … with dozens more unaccounted for.
In one video circulating on social media … smoke rises from burnt-out walls, debris lies spread across the road. Hundreds of onlookers gathered at the site, some in obvious distress. Screams can be heard in the background … Persian factchecking service Factnameh cross-referenced the video with other photos of the site to conclude the video was authentic. Reuters said it had also verified the footage as being from the school.
With just five days to pack for a house move on Thursday, I can’t give this war – I’ll say it again, this criminal war …
… the detailed coverage I’d like to devote. At least, not for the first week or more of what even Trump now acknowledges will not be over any time soon. I’ll be reading of course – listening and viewing too – but here I simply jot down my immediate thoughts.
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Just when I thought UK prime minister Keir Starmer couldn’t sink lower, here’s his press briefing yesterday.
While saying Britain had no role in the attacks, this stultifying nonentity, long ago bought mind, body and soul by Washington, stands reality, morality and basic reason on their heads. After declaring the Iranian government “utterly abhorrent” and posing “a direct threat to dissidents and the Jewish community” – how many countries has it bombed, invaded or sanctioned with lethal effect? – this sock puppet of corporate America says:
- Iran must never acquire nuclear weapons. (Something its supreme leader had ruled out many times: unwisely in my view when the region’s genocidal, apartheid, expansionist state possesses hundreds of warheads, a fact I’ll return to. And when the said genocidal, apartheid, expansionist state’s underwriter in chief has murdered millions of innocents in a quarter century of empire disruption also known as the war on terror. On his What’s Left site today, Stephen Gowans correctly observed that “Iran’s failure to follow the path of North Korea is largely responsible for the peril in which it now finds itself”.)
- The former human rights lawyer says nothing of dead schoolgirls or grief stricken parents but does condemn – in the same Planet Vacuous tones which in record time made him the most reviled UK prime minister since polls began – Iran’s response as “indiscriminate strikes at our partners in the region … many of which are not parties to this conflict”. He means Arab autocracies propped up by the CIA and housing US bases and oil fields which make them legitimate targets declared as such the moment that ‘beautiful armada’ set sail for the Eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Sea. This was never about nukes; always about regime change and, beyond that, delivering a crushing blow to Russia and China while reasserting US global hegemony. It matters little whether Starmer is knowingly a liar or just self-servingly obtuse.
One comment notes, “So many fucking lies by Kid Starver in under 4 minutes”. If you’ve the stomach for it, see how many you can spot.
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Iranian state media have confirmed yesterday’s US-Israeli claims. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has indeed been killed. Beyond inflaming Shia majorities in the aforesaid Arab autocracies, likewise Hezbollah and Ansar Allah, it’s hard to see how this will impact, if at all, on Iran’s resolve and fighting capacity. It seems likely Trump believes Iran a house of cards which will topple with the leadership taken out. It’s less likely Bibi, who has visited Washington an unprecedented seven times since Trump took office, believes that.
It’s obviously symbolic, but I don’t get why people are fixating so much on Khamenei. He does not run the country. He’s an old man whom killing would make a sacred martyr. Even if he is dead, what difference does it make besides the possibility of the declaration of holy war? The missiles and drones sure don’t seem to care either way. Have people got their brain addled from too many movies where taking out the “bad guy” ends the war?
Naked Capitalism, comment Feb 28, 17:12, with Khamenei’s death not at that point confirmed by Tehran
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Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz and is well placed to enforce that. Fill up your car.
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Social media speak of Iranian missiles taking out America’s “eyes” – radar systems in Qatar and Bahrain – in what it pleases Sir Keir to call non participant states. If true, US-Israeli attacks will be less effective. If true. Keyboard warriors sympathetic to empire targeted states can be prone, me included, to wishful thinking. Assume all primary sources are lying, and secondary sources biased. Not for nothing is it called the fog of war.
Some are calling it Epstein’s war. A thing I, like most of the Marxist left, find difficult to explain is how much agency a POTUS truly has. Ultimately s/he is owned by the corporate oligarchs who rule the USA – you don’t get high office without their backing – but how the interfaces between ruling class, deep state and official governance work is hard to gauge. A useful start is made, however, by Aaron Goode in American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, which argues that state conspiracy plays a greater role than is generally appreciated. (Including by Marxists, who tend – as once did I – to be sniffy about conspiracy theories.) That’s significant given how badly this looks set to turn out for Trump personally, giving rise to the suspicion of Bibi having Epstein kompromat on him.
If its thuggery goes badly for Israel, let’s not forget those nukes, and its Samson Option.
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Given the fog of war, I urge readers to take in and triangulate as wide a range of sources as time allows, to treat corporate media with suspicion, and to stand firm – I find meditation helps, as do Kipling’s canny words on those two imposters, triumph and disaster – in the face of wishful thinking and doom mongering alike. It’ll be a while if ever before the fat lady sings and do bear in mind that if Iran can ride out the next few weeks, that in itself will be victory. The two rogue regimes who launched this criminal act are good at blitzkrieg, less so at attrition.
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I’ll close with a thirty minute offering from Brian Berletic. As ever he combines detail with global perspective.
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Best of luck for the move.
I’ll just leave this here:
https://islanderreports.substack.com/p/the-last-entry-iraq-syria-lebanon
“THE LAST ENTRY: Iraq. Syria. Lebanon. Libya. Somalia. Sudan. Iran.
History will note that a deal was on the table, that the strike date was set in Tel Aviv while the deal was being negotiated, that eighty-five children died in a school in Minab, that the Strait closed by afternoon, that the ceasefire request came by evening. It will note the man at Mar-a-Lago and the man in Berlin. It will note that the supreme leader was killed and the missiles kept flying. And it will note that China turned off the rare earth supply to the military prosecuting the war within hours of it starting.
Iraq. Syria. Lebanon. Libya. Somalia. Sudan. Iran.
The list is complete. The twenty-five-year project has reached its final entry, and in doing so may have written the epitaph not of the Iranian republic but of the American one. The petrodollar that funded the carriers. The carriers that launched the missiles. The missiles that closed the Strait. The Strait whose closure accelerates the de-dollarisation that makes the next war impossible to finance. The rare earth ban that grounds the planes before the next forever war can be carried out.
The empire is eating itself. And it called that epic fury.”
Best of luck for the move.
Cheers Dave. So much to do! I can’t help checking in every couple hours to see the latest YouTube offerings from sources I trust. (See MFB comment and my reply, below.)
The trouble with calling for “triangulation” of one’s sources is that there are no pro-genocide, pro-aggression, pro-imperialism and pro-Zionist sources which contain even enough information to be worth debunking.
I’m a South African. Over the weekend I depended on our state-run radio news, which provided us with information about how South Africans were unhappy because they couldn’t fly to Dubai, and then provided us with BBC propaganda about how the late Ayatollah was the worst man since Hitler. Our beloved criminal President made a speech saying that he was troubled about the escalated tensions in the Middle East and hoped that these problems might soon be resolved. This morning I bought all the available newspapers, which featured Reuters propaganda about how the late Ayatollah was the worst man since Hitler.
Sorry, but there is nothing to triangulate. The propaganda is so crude, so devoid of any convincing content or even any entertaining whoppers, that I’m falling back on PressTV and (pinch of salt here) al-Jazeera.
You misunderstand me, MFB. Here’s my take on mainstream media, a paragraph I’ve recycled so many times I’ve forgotten when and in what context I first wrote it:
I agree with you, those media can’t possibly be trusted on the US-Israeli criminal war on Iran. (Which my own UK has now joined in all but name.) But there are tons of alternative voices out there, many – take a look at a few of my recent posts – replicated on this site. I spend hours each day tuning into alternative voices and, while almost all are honest, it’s vital to understand and allow for their worldviews – ditto any tendency to wishful thinking or its opposite – and cross check against one another and against emerging realities. Whose analyses generated the most accurate predictions? And where predictions are proved wrong by history – a distinct probability in these turbulent times – do they own their mistakes?
(Al-jazeera, btw, is a good example. It does well on many things and, because I get its Qatar ownership – which made it useless on the dirty war on Syria. and will contaminate its coverage of this latest in the same chain of wars of empire subjugation – it’s still one I consult. Didn’t LBJ say a snake is only dangerous when you don’t know it’s there?)
This is what I mean by triangulation. I’d love to say more but am pressed for time. Thanks for raising a key point.
One piece of triangulation: According to Larry Johnston, Trump asked the Italian Government to propose a ceasefire to Iran, which was immediately turned down by Iran.
Another: According to (even) the Guardian, “a number” of US aircraft have crashed (i.e. been shot down).
Another: various posters in various places assert that Iran has fired four missiles at a US carrier – one of which hit it, and it is now limping away.
Of course, that’s just stuff that I personally like and approve of, from one apex of the ‘triangle’. But the truth will out eventually anyway. Some of it may take a while, but the US congress is not good at keeping secrets.
According to War Monitor……..
https://x.com/WarMonitors/status/2028433652753793284
Tehran is suffering ‘carpet bombing’.
If so, the question arises as to where is the Air Defence?
On the other side of the coin there are reports and videos of oil facilities up in flames in Saudi Arabia. With other reports claiming that the Iranians are denying responsibility.
Other reports, with videos, claim at least two US fighter jets shot down over Kuwait near the Iraqi border. Though there are reports this is down to “friendly fire”.
Which is ironic in a way given the old WW2 trope of the British diving for cover when the Luftwaffe flew over; the Germans doing the same when the RAF flew past; and everyone hitting the dirt when the trigger-happy American Air Force were overhead.