Minab students return to school year haunted by airstrike trauma

As students across Iran prepare for a new school year, the southern city of Minab is marking the occasion under the shadow of last February's missile strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, which killed more than 160 pupils and teachers.

At the site of the destroyed school, the national flag flies near the rubble. Photographs of the students and faculty members who died are displayed where the building once stood.

Yasin, a student who survived the strike, returned to the ruins with his mother. He described the moments after the explosion: people emerging covered in blood, one holding an eye in his hand, another with a broken neck, and shrapnel wounds among those fleeing. "Everyone was crying and running," he recalled.

Among the dead was his close friend Amir Mohammad Bagheri. Yasin said the two had been standing together that day when he suggested they go and collect a food container. Bagheri agreed but left through the hall, and Yasin went on alone. The next morning, he learned his friend had been killed.

Months on, Yasin's mother said the attack has left her son under severe psychological strain and stripped him of any enthusiasm for the new term. He no longer asks for shoes or a school bag, she said, and has become nervous and aggressive, at times striking his own head with whatever he is holding. She added that the trauma extends to all the children who survived, not only her son.

For the coming year, many survivors, including Yasin, will move to a temporary building to continue their studies. City officials are constructing a new school near the old one, which may be larger than the structure it replaces.

Yasin said the survivors miss their friends and will keep studying together, learning and continuing on the path of those they lost. "Our friends are studying in heaven, while we are studying here on Earth," he said.