The US killed children in Minab and broke the rules-based order

By Klaus Berger · Reporting from Frankfurt · September 17, 2026

The international community operates on a ledger of legitimacy.

The international community operates on a ledger of legitimacy. For decades, the United States has positioned itself as the chief auditor of this ledger, insisting that the "rules-based order" is the only thing separating civilization from chaos. But as any fixed-income strategist knows, a balance sheet is only as good as its underlying assets. When the asset is "moral authority" and the liability is a Tomahawk missile striking a primary school, the account goes into default.

The findings released by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran are not merely a diplomatic embarrassment; they are a forensic accounting of institutional recklessness. According to reporting by The Guardian and NPR, the UN mission found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes on 28 February 2026. The most damning entry in this ledger is the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab. The result: 156 civilians killed, including 120 children.

The tragedy is not the "accident" itself—war is a series of accidents—but the failure of the verification process. The US relied on intelligence suggesting a senior Iranian military commander was on-site but failed to adequately verify that information. In the cold language of the UN experts, the US directed the strikes at the school while being aware of a substantial risk to civilians, acting "recklessly." This is the hallmark of magical thinking: the belief that the precision of the weapon compensates for the sloppiness of the intelligence.

The Precision Fallacy and the Architecture of Denial

There is a seductive lie in modern warfare: that "precision-guided" means "error-free." The US military apparatus treats precision as a moral shield, suggesting that if the missile hits the exact coordinates programmed into it, the act is justified, regardless of what those coordinates actually represent. But a Tomahawk missile is a tool, not a judge.

This pattern of operational blindness is not new. We saw it in the 2017 United States airstrikes against Syria, where high-precision weapons still yielded civilian casualties that triggered intense legal scrutiny. The mechanism is always the same: a failure of the "human-in-the-loop" to question the data.

The subsequent handling of the Minab and Lamerd strikes—where a sports complex was hit, killing 22 civilians—reveals a deeper institutional rot. While the Pentagon conducted a secretive investigation and later elevated the probe, it has published nothing. US Central Command spent March denying any strikes in Lamerd. Even President Donald Trump, in June, claimed "nobody" had purposely attacked a girls’ school. This is the architecture of denial. It mirrors the early days of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse in 2004, where the initial instinct of the hierarchy was to isolate the "few bad apples" rather than acknowledge a systemic failure of command and oversight.

The My Lai Logic of Collateral Damage

The most capable advocate for the United States would argue that this was a tragedy of proximity, not a crime of intent. They would point out that the Shajareh Tayyebeh school was adjacent to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval complex. They would argue that in the heat of a war that began in February, the presence of a high-value target justifies a calculated risk. They would call it "collateral damage"—a term designed to sanitize the slaughter of children into a statistical necessity.

This argument fails because it ignores the legal and moral threshold of recklessness. When the UN concludes that the school was the "intended point of impact" despite the known risks, the "proximity" argument becomes a confession.

This is the same mechanism that drove the My Lai Massacre in 1968. In Vietnam, the slaughter of hundreds of non-combatants was justified by the perceived necessity of clearing a "hot" zone and the assumption that anyone in the village was a combatant or a collaborator. The shared mechanism between My Lai and Minab is the erasure of the civilian from the operational calculus. In both instances, the military objective was used to override the basic rule of distinction. When you decide that a target is so valuable that the deaths of 120 children are an acceptable risk, you are no longer conducting a military operation; you are committing a massacre by proxy.

The Ledger of Two Atrocities

We must be clear: the crimes of the United States do not absolve the crimes of the Iranian government. The same UN mission found that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity during the crackdown on anti-government protests that began in late December. With 3,038 people officially killed and 25,000 injured—numbers the UN believes are likely far higher—the Iranian state has proven itself a butcher of its own people.

However, the Iranian government will now use the UN report as a moral shield, attempting to create a false equivalence between its internal repression and the US airstrikes. This is a tactical victory for Tehran, but a strategic disaster for Washington.

The US cannot demand that Iran adhere to international law while it treats the Geneva Conventions as optional suggestions. When the US ignores the rules it spent seventy years writing, it doesn't just kill children in Minab; it kills the very idea of a rules-based order. We have seen this erosion before, notably in the 2015 Russian airstrikes against Syrian opposition, where the targeting of schools and hospitals became a normalized feature of the conflict. By mirroring this recklessness, the US has ceased to be the auditor of the international ledger and has become just another debtor.

The Pentagon may eventually release its findings, and the Trump administration may offer more denials, but the facts are already in the record. The US has traded its institutional discipline for the convenience of "precision" strikes based on unverified data. In doing so, it has proven that it views the lives of non-combatants as a rounding error in the pursuit of a military objective. There is no "intelligence failure" that justifies the death of 120 children; there is only a failure of will to follow the rules. The United States has not just committed a war crime; it has bankrupt its own claim to leadership.

The US killed children in Minab and broke the rules-based order

The Precision Fallacy and the Architecture of Denial

The My Lai Logic of Collateral Damage

The Ledger of Two Atrocities

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