On the morning of February 28, 2026, the elementary school of Shajareh Tayyebeh in Minab, Iran, became the site of a profound existential rupture. Within four hours of the initiation of localized aerial strikes against Iran by U.S. and Israeli military, a missile—later identified by forensic fragments as a precision-guided munition of American manufacture—struck the facility. According to statistics released by Iranian authorities, 168 people were killed and 96 injured in the attack. According to reports, among the dead were 110 students, including 66 boys and 54 girls, 26 female teachers, and four parents. 

In its recent report on this disaster, Human Rights Watch stated that its investigations show that this attack was carried out using highly accurate guided munitions, not weapons that had a defect in their guidance or propulsion system or that accidentally hit the area due to a malfunction. While many in the US regime and the diaspora Iranians continue to deny American culpability, the New York Times concluded,

An ongoing military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings […] While the overall finding was largely expected — the United States is the only country involved in the conflict that uses Tomahawk missiles — it has already cast a shadow on the U.S. military operation in Iran. (1)

The official toll of 168 dead, including 110 children between the ages of seven and twelve, represents more than a “collateral” error; it represents the violent intersection of technological precision and moral indifference. 

According to Guardian, The Shajareh Tayyebeh school was adjacent to a cluster of buildings that form the local Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval barracks and support buildings. The Guardian cross-referenced verified videos from the site of the bombing with satellite imagery to confirm the location of the primary school. The satellite imagery shows that while the school’s building was once part of the wider IRGC complex, it has been walled off from the barracks for at least nine years. According to the same report, there is no indication that the school was a military-use building at the time of the strike. Its location, however, provides a plausible reason why the US or Israel may have selected targets in that area.

The History of Collateral Death

The Minab massacre is not the first by USA’s military in its history, but one of a number of well known among such massacres. The most well known, for it is important to recall it at this very moment, is the Afghanistan massacres committed by a US military unit, “the kill team”, which documented their torture and murder of the poorest, of which a majority were children, as “war memento” or trophies. There is a report by Rolling Stone Magazine, which I must caution contains extremely graphic and disturbing images. 

To understand the Minab massacre, one must situate it within a genealogy of similar acts violence, forms of brutality that all began under the code name of “bringing democracy” and ultimately left nothing but a pile of mutilated bodies: The 1991 bombing of the Al-Amiriyah shelter in Iraq, the 2015 destruction of the MSF hospital in Kunduz and the deadly air raid against refugee shelter near Raqqa to name a few.  The current civilian casualty figures, as in similar examples, are not just a warning incident and a passing symptom; they are pervasive and part of a mechanism that prioritizes killing over life, whatever be the name or justification for it.

The Oxford English dictionary makes the meaning and the intention of the use of the euphemism quite clear, 

“deaths of or injury to civilians (= people not in the armed forces) or damage to buildings that are not connected to the military during a war. People say ‘collateral damage’ to avoid saying ‘innocent people being killed’.”

The term of art of war, “collateral damage”, was invented possibly by T. C. Schelling, an economist, in 1961. The discipline of economics is more or less a discipline about war by other means. The central question in that article is one that which terrorises all Iranians, its neighbours, and those who are people with conscience, “The critical question for U.S. intra-war doctrine is whether an all-out nuclear response has a good enough prospect of fore- stalling destruction […]”. (2)

If the little girls of a school can be collateral damage, what prevents the US Israeli military intellects from thinking the same, from the point of view of an instant solution, 93 million people as also collateral damage through the invention of a sufficient “curve ball” (3) or a false flag event? Is there anyone who possesses the answer? 

The liberal press of the west continues to give another argument for this war which is “freedom”.  In all the instances of giving “freedom” to the people of the poorer countries and militarily weaker countries—Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Palestine, Syria, Vietnam, Cambodia and the south American nations—it has meant giving the gift of death from above through bombs and below through sanctions. Iran had never not been under these sanctions, or “the illegal siege laid by the USA in most parts of the world under the euphemism ‘sanctions’”. (4) These sanctions have killed more efficiently than bombs. A study undertaken by the Lancet Global Health found the unilateral economic sanctions—imposed by the United States and the European Union—resulted in approximately 38 million deaths worldwide between 1971 and 2021. (5)

Although it may seem repetitive or tautological, freedom is not just a political slogan; it is an existential condition for humanity, as that which assures a quest or a striving for the meaning of living together. However, “freedom” used as a euphemism merely means “fit to kill”. Freedom finds meaning in the security of bodies, in the possibility of speech, in trust between people, and in the continuity of civil life. 

In the experience of everyday life, the permissiveness afforded by the means–ends relationship is the span of man that lets him feel alight, with its pains and pleasures: the substitution of the ears of a good friend for the analyst, the persiflage in the evenings, the exchange of the organs, castling in a chess game, substitution in a football game, and the peculiar freedom given by the market through product differentiations. Exchange of a means for another, one end for another, end for a means, and means for an end are the freedoms of human principality, which are schematized in politics. (6)

But war targets precisely these foundations, it functionally isolates our bodies into that which should exist in an immediate relation to death. With the outbreak of war, a state of exception replaces normal order; law becomes flexible, surveillance expands, and morality is postponed. What is unthinkable in normal circumstances becomes an unavoidable necessity in war. (7) 

At the same time, what is being sold to us these days under the label of "military targeting" is in practice nothing more than the technical administration of slaughter. One might say Gaza is the model for Lebanon, Syria and now Iran. But one would be wrong. Gaza was modelled on Libya; Libya modelled on Afghanistan; Afghanistan on Iraq; Iraq on Yugoslavia. We are therefore guilt of a Platonic model of forgetting. After an event of mass murder, the people are made to forget it thoroughly through a “moving on” ceremony initiated by western propaganda through cinema, pop music, senseless controversies, simulacrum of political battles. But the western model of war and mass death, as it was perfected by the ‘great’ Britain in India where they killed, with total ease, at least 100 million people, which most Indians have since forgotten. (8) And what the world's ruling regime and the warmongering opposition promote in the name of freedom is nothing more than the domestication of the war-purification machine.

In every modern war, before the missile reaches the ground, words are poured into the fabric of society like a deadly virus: “legitimate target,” “surgical strike,” or “collateral damage.” From Iran and Yemen to Iraq and Afghanistan and Hiroshima, these words are not meant to explain reality but to make bearable the real of everyday horror, or in other words, what today has taken the place of the reality that should prevail, that is, the reality of men, women, and children caught in the flames of war and destruction. These specialized or key words are supposed to create a distance between what is seen in the operations room in the form of coordinates and satellite images and what lands on the human body, on the school, on the hospital, on the neighborhood, and on the collective memory of a society. In the current war against Iran, the same logic is at work in all its audacity.

The aim of the current article is to examine and analyze this situation, attempting to move beyond the surface-level rhetoric of technical failure to uncover the underlying logic of state racism, the simulacrum of ethics, and the systematic production of ungrievable lives.

The Mechanism of State Racism

We need to consider Michel Foucault's concept of Biopower in order to comprehend how a school in Hormozgan becomes a valid target in the perspective of a far-off superpower. Foucault traces the development of power from the sovereign's right to kill to the contemporary state's obligation to control life in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1975 and 1976. 

Foucault points out a paradox, though: if the state's role is to "make live," how can it use the power of death? He describes this shift as

[t]he right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to 'make' live and to 'let' die. (9)

His answer to how a normalizing state can justify killing lies in State Racism. He argues that racism is the indispensable mechanism that allows the biopolitical state to exercise the death penalty or wage war: 

In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and racism 1s the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State. (10)

With the emergence of the nation-state, the discourse of war is no longer that of subjected group, which wants to destroy the unity of the state and organize it by its vision. The state is now allied with its population, and the threat is constituted as everything that differs from the biological norms postulated in that society. Politics becomes a continuation of war for the benefit of the state.

Here we find the appearance of state racism which will, according to the aforementioned logic, turn society against itself, against its own elements and its own products. Foucault thinks that racism is born at the point when the idea of racial purity replaces that of race struggle. Accordingly, racism functions as “primarily a way of introducing break into the domain of life that is under power’s control, the break between what must live and what must die. […] It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population.” (11)

In other words, Foucault argues that racism is the mechanism that introduces a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: The break between what must live and what must die. This phenomenon represents not only biological racism but also the political fragmentation of the human species. Within the context of the Minab massacre, Iranian civilians are classified as either a biological threat or a security risk by proxy. Although such a reading is not openly expressed in the western official discourse, it can be read as part of the morbid logic of race and state. War does not only produce instruments of killing; it creates a new language. Words change meaning and the distance between reality and its description increases. Civilian deaths are called “collateral damage,” destruction is called “precision operations,” and collective fear is justified in the name of “security.” In the process, language is no longer the bearer of truth; it itself becomes a tool for making violence tolerable.

As language evolves, moral sensitivity may diminish. Societies repeatedly exposed to reports of death can gradually lose their capacity for empathy. Violence shifts from being shocking to becoming normalized, and this normalization represents one of the most perilous consequences of war. The hegemon's logic frames the demolition of a school in the "Global South" as an unpleasant but essential measure to protect the civilized world. The cost of the health of the neoliberal regime is the child's death in Minab. In this context, the school is not a school; rather, it is a place where others live and whose presence could potentially impede the flow of global power.

The Naming of Evil

The dominant narrative transforms the complex reality of war into a simple morality tale: a battle between an oppressive government and a people who must be freed. In such a framework, war is portrayed not as a human catastrophe but as a means of liberation. Surprisingly, this narrative prevails not only among the diaspora (which is generally very accustomed to following domestic tragedies in the form of Instagram or Twitter posts) but also among a significant portion of the population inside Iran. As a result, the truth of war is concealed. It is replaced by a straightforward, moral, and sentimental story that gives reality a predetermined meaning and direction instead of comprehending its complexity.

From the media to memory and collective conscience, in this flawed structure, the “other” is no longer a human being with similar experiences and suffering, but an abstract threat. In such circumstances, killing is seen not as a tragedy but as a duty. And even if the act of killing results in the destruction of civilians, its significance is downplayed in order to pave the way for a post-liberation tomorrow. 

While Foucault’s biopolitics offers a mechanism to analyze the structural justification for mass casualties, Alain Badiou’s philosophical framework provides the necessary tools to critique the discursive and ethical obfuscation that inevitably follows such state-sponsored violence. Within Badiou’s ethical system, a "Truth-Event" signifies a radical, unpredictable rupture that disrupts the continuity of the established order and mandates a fundamental shift in perception. The tragedy at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school functions as such an Event—a catastrophic intrusion of the "Real" that fundamentally invalidates prevailing global security narratives. Badiou’s primary concern focuses on the ways in which established power structures respond to such ruptures by constructing a simulacrum. He posits that when a radical disruption in a situation—while utilizing the terminology and formal aspects of a genuine truth-process—fails to open up to a universal void and instead reinforces the full particularity or pre-existing substance of that situation, it produces a simulacrum of truth. (12)

Concurrently, the Western political response to the Minab massacre functions as a discursive strategy to "name" the tragedy in a manner that sanitizes its brutality. By substituting the singular, human reality of the slaughter with a technical simulacrum—such as bureaucratic rhetoric regarding operational errors—the apparatus domesticates the horror. A genuine commitment to the truth would necessitate acknowledging these children as subjects of inherent value; instead, they are effectively reclassified as mere objects within a failed military operation. This reflects what might be identified as a profound ethical failure: a systemic, collective effort to obscure the internal contradictions of a mechanism that prioritizes the unchecked expansion of its strategic objectives, even at the cost of innocent life. Badiou suggests that evil occurs when we attempt to force a truth to serve a specific power structure. 

The anxiety found in the Iranian Diaspora—the fear that mourning the victims of an American strike might inadvertently bolster the Iranian regime—is a classic example of what in a Badiouian terminology could be described as a betrayal of fidelity to the truth. In this scenario, the truth of the 110 children’s deaths is being held hostage by political utility. When the recognition of a massacre is suppressed because it is deemed strategically inconvenient, the truth is sacrificed to the transient opinions of the existing political milieu. What makes the issue most horrifying is that it is apparently a calculated question of whether the death of a few hundred people is a reasonable price to pay for the liberation of a nation. The vulgarity of our situation is defined precisely at this intersection, where such a sordid proposition is allowed to emerge in the first place.

This vicious approach ultimately uses a kind of clever polarization to suppress any dissent: if someone opposes the bombing of Tehran and other Iranian cities, they are probably a staunch supporter of the ruling power in Iran. At the heart of this narrative, war is processed and presented as a logical and expanding issue; at first everything begins with a so-called limited operation whose sometimes uncomfortable results must be accepted in order to hope for a better tomorrow. The seemingly obvious but at the same time important complication is that the consequences of such an approach always get out of control and the violence that was started for a specific purpose and was supposed to be temporary becomes a permanent structure.

Beyond the exhausting debates over whether to support or condemn the war, there is something else that must be stated. These words are written at a precipice where the writer might vanish before the sentence is even finished, erased by an “accidental” strike. Yet, simultaneously, just outside the window, life persists. In the streets below, people continue to move, fueled by an enduring yearning for freedom and prosperity. Perhaps this is not the apocalypse after all—at least not yet—if only because of the faint, persistent sound of motorcycles and cars navigating the streets with trepidation, and the people who still insist on living in these alleys, even amidst the fear and anxiety. 

Even if ninety percent of life is ground away by the weight of these days, that last ten percent is not to be forgotten, nor should we let it be destroyed. As Jean-Luc Nancy once said, perhaps prophetically, “we need another language, that is to say, not new words, but another capacity to listen, another sensitivity to meaning itself... if possible!” (13)

NOTES 

1. “U.S. at Fault in Strike on School in Iran, Preliminary Inquiry Says”, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Tyler Pager, Malachy Browne and Helene Cooper, The New York Times, 11 March 2026. 

2. “Dispersal, Deterrence, and Damage”, T. C. Schelling, Operations Research , May - Jun., 1961, Vol. 9, No. 3 (May - Jun., 1961), pp. 363-370. 

3. See “Teleography and Tendencies: Part 1 Ukraine”, Shaj Mohan, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/teleography-and-tendencies-part-1-ukraine/

4. The philosophers are optimistic with caution “There is still time for the rest of the world to reason and realise a new principle for the revolutions, which will have to liberate the peoples of third worlds from the desert puppets, clown dictators, and the literal butchers of people put in place by white nationalists to contain the people of the third worlds in their misery”. See “Sans-colonial, For the People of Venezuela”, Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan, Philosophy World Democracy, 4 January 2026, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/posts/article/sans-colonial-for-the-people-of-venezuela   

5. “Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis”, Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot, Lancet Global Health, 2025; 13: e1358-66.

6. Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics, Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019, pp. 129-130. 

7. See “Reckless endangerment warfare: Civilian casualties and the collateral damage exception in international humanitarian law”, Bruce Cronin, Journal of Peace Research, march 2013, Vol. 50, No. 2 (march 2013), pp. 175-187. 

8. See “How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years”, Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel, Al Jazeera, 2 Dec 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians 

9.  Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, Ed. Bertani, Mauro and Fontana, Alessandro. New York: Picador, p. 241. 

10. Ibid.: p. 256. 

11. Ibid.: pp. 254-255. 

12. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001, p.73.

13. Nancy, Jean-Luc. "To Be Listening. Interview with Kamran Baradaran. Philosophy-World-Democracy Journal, March 29, 2021, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/interviews-1/to-be-listening