NPR’s Sacha Pfeiffer speaks with Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News, which has issued an extensive new report on the U.S. airstrikes on a school in southern Iran.

Transcript

SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:

Of the hundreds of U.S. or Israeli airstrikes that launched the war with Iran on the last day of February, at least two of them directly hit a school in session. That school was in a city in southern Iran called Minab. At least 156 people were killed. One hundred and twenty of them were children. Twenty-six were teachers. That’s according to extensive news reporting from the investigative news outlet Drop Site News. Its reporters spoke with many people who were there, including teachers…

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UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: (Non-English language spoken).

PFEIFFER: …Parents…

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UNIDENTIFIED PARENT: (Non-English language spoken).

PFEIFFER: …And first responders.

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UNIDENTIFIED FIRST RESPONDER: (Non-English language spoken).

PFEIFFER: Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill was one person piecing together these accounts, which we will warn include graphic detail of child casualties.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Witnesses describe just a massive series of whoosh, boom, and explosions that take place. The first one hits, and all of the glass of the windows in the preschool just shatter onto the floor. And the preschool teacher starts telling her children get – you know, get under the desk. And then in quick succession, another strike happens and concrete starts to fall. And then silence. So then they rush outside. And when they step outside, this teacher, with all of her little 5- and 6-year-olds, says that she turns her neck back and sees that the school is in flames and there’s a huge cloud of smoke just erupting from what used to be the school building.

And she’s telling the kids, don’t look back. And she’s ushering them out into the street, the road near the school. And at that point, she starts to see first responders. And then what we heard from those first responders – we spoke to the first firemen that arrived there – was a scene of doomsday, they said. Total apocalypse. Body parts everywhere. Shredded children. Kids who were basically pulverized against concrete. Body parts in trees. None of them were – say that they’ve ever been able to shake the images they saw in that first moment because what they witnessed was the shredding of children.

PFEIFFER: Your reporting is extremely unsparing in the gore of what happened that day. And that’s the facts. Can you also talk about why you decided to go into that detail about the aftermath?

SCAHILL: I started to talk to Iranians whose lives were impacted by this bombing. I realized this story needs to be told the way that we would tell the story of what happened in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing or the school shooting in Florida; that we have an obligation – especially because we’re Americans, and this is being done by our leaders, and as journalists, we have to hold our own government accountable above all else – that the American people must understand the human cost of this; that these were families just like American families, and their stories deserve to be told, especially because the bombs were launched on orders from our country, from the United States, at the top levels of the leadership.

PFEIFFER: On the question of responsibility, the United States initially denied striking the area. In fact, President Trump at one point said, without evidence, that Iran had done it. Since then, NPR has confirmed that a preliminary internal investigation by the Pentagon did determine U.S. responsibility. Has the U.S. announced anything since then about what it plans to do about that? Compensation for families? Anything?

SCAHILL: No. In fact, Trump recently at the G7 got very angry when a reporter asked him about it and said, what? This happened, you know, long ago. Why are you asking about this? If I needed to, I could put out a report about it tomorrow. But the fact is, all we have right now are leaks from informed sources, but also their narrative. Why is the president of the United States, who has all access, highly classified intelligence, running around saying that the Iranians have Tomahawk cruise missiles? It’s not true. Only five countries in the world have them, and Iran is not one of them.

Why is he saying Iran may have bombed their own people when we can see the wreckage of Raytheon cruise missiles in the photos that we obtained that were taken from under the rubble? There were two direct hits on a school filled with children and teachers. It’s not that there hasn’t been reporting on this. It’s that that reporting has not been translated into a very robust, aggressive investigation of what I would say is one of the worst single war crimes committed by the United States since Vietnam.

PFEIFFER: Jeremy, you have spent a lot of your career covering the consequences of U.S. military operations around the world, including consequences for civilians. And you’ve – you just referenced some past cases of this where there are similarities. Is there anything about this case that seems different to you than tragedies like this that you’ve reported on in the past?

SCAHILL: Most Iranians that we’ve spoken to – at different levels, whether they’re government or ordinary people – believe that this was intentional because the United States wanted to kill the supreme leader in the opening moments of the war and then send a message to the Iranian people that no place, including your school, is going to be safe as long as this regime remains in power. So most military experts I talked to say they don’t believe that that’s the case – that they believe that this was a rush to war, an emphasis on lethality over everything else. They wanted to break records with the number of targets they struck very early on.

And they streamlined everything. They kicked aside concerns about civilian deaths. They used outdated satellite photos and didn’t bother to have a human being vet it to make sure it wasn’t a school full of children. You know, there’s no evidence at all in the public right now to suggest that they understood that there were children inside of that school and decided to bomb it to send a message to Iran. But unfortunately, because of the characters that we have running the Pentagon and the statements of the president himself, that unfortunately should be a line of inquiry by the U.S. Congress to understand, did they intentionally attack this school because they believed they were the children of the IRGC that were attending it? Unfortunately, that’s a question that needs to be asked.

PFEIFFER: Jeremy, all these months later, are you still in touch with any family members who lost kids, who lost spouses? And if so, how are they doing since this has not really resolved?

SCAHILL: No, I mean, their lives are a living nightmare. They live with the long shadow of the loss of their children and the loss of their children in an utterly horrifying way. You know, one of the fathers that I spoke to had been an accountant for a shrimp business in Minab. It’s a huge fishing area. And he and his wife had been trying to have a child. And then when their daughter Fatemeh was born, he considered it a gift, and they sought out this school, even though it wasn’t the closest school to them. And he said to me, I thank God that we found that school and that we got Fatemeh into it.

And his daughter, who was 6 years old, died that day, and she died in the arms of her teacher, with her cousin. And they know that because the teacher’s body was severely damaged and wounded, and the little girls’ bodies were fully intact when they brought them in the ambulance to the hospital after they recovered them from the school. He lives with that every day of his life. And when I asked him, you know, what does justice look like? He said, I don’t want to talk about courts or anything like this. He said, you know, God at some point is going to have his say in this. And many Iranians are saying that, if anything, this reinforces that the only way to respond to the United States is with building a deterrence. So I think that the Minab massacre pierced the heart of Iranians from across the political and economic specter (ph).

PFEIFFER: That is Jeremy Scahill. He’s a journalist at the investigative news site Drop Site News. Jeremy, thank you for your reporting.

SCAHILL: Thanks for having me.

PFEIFFER: We reached out to the White House and the Pentagon about the assertion that this act constituted a war crime. We didn’t hear back before airtime. But in a response to a previous assessment of this incident as a war crime, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly issued a statement that read, in part, the only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime.

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