Mohammad Ali Kialha was born on February 26 in Tehran. He had 20 days. That’s it. Twenty days of being held, fed, loved. Twenty days of his grandmother riding a hundred miles just to meet him while fighter jets circled overhead. Then on March 18, an American airstrike hit his apartment building and he was gone.
His mother Hannaneh died with him. His 7-year-old brother Mohammad Hassan. His uncle Mehdi, his aunt Manzar, and their three children: Ali, 13, Fatemeh, 9, and Zeynab, 7. Eight people in one family, wiped out in a single strike on a residential building in Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood.
Now here’s what I want somebody to explain to me like I’m five years old. Admiral Brad Cooper, the man running U.S. Central Command, sat before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May and said, with a straight face, “There is one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions” dropped during this war. One. Out of thirteen thousand, six hundred and twenty-nine bombs. One investigation.
GTVM92 (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsI’m sorry, what?
Rescue workers pulled 30 bodies from that rubble in Pirouzi. Neighbors had to tell the crews a baby was still under the debris because they were about to pack up and leave. They found Mohammad Ali’s tiny body hours later. And the Pentagon’s position is that this didn’t happen. A CENTCOM spokesperson told The Intercept, “The U.S. military takes all reports of civilian harm seriously.” Bless their hearts. They take it so seriously they’ve opened exactly one investigation.
Here’s what gets me. I have spent my whole life in churches where we pray for the unborn. We march. We hold signs. We vote for politicians who say they’ll protect life. And I mean every word of that. But you don’t get to call yourself pro-life and then shrug at a 20-day-old baby pulled from bombed rubble. You don’t. Life is life, and it doesn’t stop at the water’s edge.
Mehdi Salehi / PexelsTrump wrote “Bombs will be dropping everywhere” on February 28. He wasn’t kidding. That same day, American forces hit the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab. Over 150 people died, most of them children. At an elementary school. The U.S. military calls this Operation Epic Fury, which tells you everything you need to know about the people running this show. They named it like a video game.
The Israeli military claimed they killed a top Iranian intelligence commander named Mehdi Rostami that same day. The grandmother, Tahereh Sarbaz, says her son was a university professor. “I deny this,” she told The Intercept. And then she said something that ought to keep every general in that building up tonight: “If what Israel claims were true, I would be very glad. But the presence of a 20-day-old infant among the victims, and the killing of eight members of one family,”