On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel attacked Iran in the opening wave of what Washington called Operation Epic Fury and Israel called Operation Roaring Lion. During those first strikes, a missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab while classes were underway. Between 168 and 180 people died, and about 95 were injured, most of them schoolchildren, many of them girls between seven and twelve years old.
The strike occurred during the first hours of the joint assault on Iranian military infrastructure. Israel launched roughly 200 fighter aircraft against targets across the country while US forces fired cruise missiles and drones at missile systems, air-defence sites and command facilities associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. One of the attacks in Tehran killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with senior officials and security personnel, escalating the “operation” into a wider regional confrontation. Schoolgirls died so world leaders could battle on for oil and power.
Any account of the war must also acknowledge the record of the Iranian state. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s clerical government has imposed strict controls on women through compulsory veiling laws and morality policing. Women have been arrested, beaten and imprisoned for defying dress codes or protesting discrimination. The death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022 triggered nationwide protests led largely by young women under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”, demonstrations that were met with lethal force and mass arrests. Human rights groups claim thousands of political prisoners and dissidents have been executed by the Islamic Republic over the decades, including mass executions in the late 1980s. Iran remains one of the world’s leading executioners, with more than 900 people executed in 2024 alone.
Critics of the present war also point to the long history of American interference abroad. The United States has intervened militarily in conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that together have caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and displaced millions. In Afghanistan alone, more than 176,000 people were killed during the two-decade war following the 2001 invasion. Washington remains Israel’s principal arms supplier in the war in Gaza, where Palestinian authorities report more than 72,000 people killed since October 2023, with women and children forming a large share of the casualties. Firearms are now the leading cause of death among American children. Over the past decade, gun violence has killed roughly 25,000 children and teenagers in the United States (source: CDC). Not forgetting that the US was built on centuries of slavery and a current state of near institutionalised racism.
Make no mistake. There are no heroes here. Women bear the cost under regimes that control them and under bombs dropped in the name of saving them. War rooms speak of security and protection. The evidence on the ground is the opposite. This is not about good over evil. Never was. These wars were always about power, land, oil, arms and wealth.
This Sunday, Bookshelf turns to Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist and essayist whose work has long confronted injustice, militarism and the abuse of power, speaking in New Delhi on March 9, 2026.
“I have something to say because I’m my mother’s daughter and because I need to straighten my shoulders and say this. It’s a little statement about the war that is about to consume the world.
“I know we are here today to talk about Mother Mary Comes To Me. But how can we end the day without talking about those beautiful cities — Tehran, Isfahan and Beirut — that are up in flames? In keeping with my Mother Mary’s spirit of candour and impoliteness, I would like to use this platform to say something about the unprovoked and illegal attack by the United States and Israel on Iran. It is, of course, a continuation of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. It’s the same old genocidaires using the same old playbook. Murdering women and children. Bombing hospitals. Carpet bombing cities. And then playing the victim.
“But Iran is not Gaza. The theatre of this new war could expand to consume the whole world. We are on the brink of nuclear calamity and economic collapse. The same country that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be readying itself to bomb one of the most ancient civilisations in the world. There will be other occasions to speak of this in detail, so here let me simply say that I stand with Iran. Unequivocally. Any regimes that need changing, including the US, Israel and ours, need to be changed by the people, not by some bloated, lying, cheating, greedy, resource-grabbing, bomb-dropping imperial power and its allies who are trying to bully the whole world into submission.
“What sort of people are we whose elected government cannot stand up and condemn the US when it kidnaps and assassinates heads of state of other countries? Would we like that done to us? For our prime minister to have travelled to Israel and embraced Benjamin Netanyahu just days before he attacked Iran — what does it mean? For our government to sign a grovelling trade deal with the US that literally sells our farmers and textile industry down the river, only days before the US Supreme Court declared Trump’s tariffs illegal — what does it mean? For us to now be given ‘permission’ to buy oil from Russia — what does it mean?
“At the height of the genocide in Gaza, the government of India sent thousands of poor Indian workers to Israel to replace expelled Palestinian workers. Today, while Israelis take shelter in bunkers, it is being reported that those Indian workers are not allowed into those shelters. What the hell does all this mean? Who has put us into this absolutely humiliating, shameless, disgusting place in the world?
“Some of you will remember how we used to joke about that florid, overblown Chinese communist term, ‘Running Dog of Imperialism’. But right now, I’d say, it describes us well.”- Arundhati Roy. Credit: The Wire, a non-profit independent publication, India.
To those who may find Arundhati Roy’s words extreme, it is worth remembering Amanpour’s distinction between neutrality and truth.
“Objectivity does not mean treating victim and aggressor the same. Objectivity doesn’t mean ascribing a false moral equivalence. But that’s what our governments were trying to do.-Christiane Amanpour.
Words must be stronger than tanks, stronger than oil, stronger than nuclear power. Journalists and writers like Arundhati Roy, Christiane Amanpour, and the many women who speak up, and who’ve given their lives speaking up, showing up men who perpetuate wars, show us how it is done.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the 2023 Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days.
