When the US and Israeli attacks against Iran began on February 28, Soma Salimi’s family asked him to leave Tehran and return to Bukan, a Kurdish region in the north of the country. But Salimi decided to stay so as not to leave her job as a psychotherapist for children with autism or separate from her husband. The couple had recently moved into an apartment in the Resalat district, a densely populated residential area east of the Iranian capital. On March 9, a bombing from the United States and Israel hit the building in which they lived and left it completely destroyed; Salimi died in the attack. His mother spent two weeks waiting for them to find something in the rubble that they could bury. This thirty-year-old is one of the more than 3,000 people who have died in Iran in just six weeks of war.
The conflict is now in , waiting for a definitive truce to be signed if the negotiations that begin this Friday in Pakistan are successful. The pause, however, whose death toll in Israeli bombings increases every day. And, in Iran, the ceasefire comes late for thousands of families. The stories of many of the victims may never be told.
Salimi’s story is told by Arina Moradi, her childhood friend and volunteer at the human rights organization Hengaw, based in Oslo (Norway). This association has been documenting, for ten years, the abuses of the Iranian regime against its population, especially against the Kurdish minority, and now also the victims of the war.
Moradi learned of Salimi’s death when he was translating the cases verified by Hengaw from Persian into English. “When I realized it was my childhood friend, I started crying,” she says. He remembers her full of life and happy with the children she took care of, as seen in the photos that remain on her Instagram account, in which she appears with them at costume parties and games. Moradi explains that his organization was unable to discover what or who was the target of the attack.
The Pentagon’s bellicose discourse characterized the offensive. A few hours before he announced the ceasefire on Tuesday, Donald Trump had promised that “deaths” would occur that night. The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, spoke, in his press conferences about the conflict, of unleashing “” against “those who deserve no mercy.” When to finance the war, he justified: “It takes money to kill the bad guys.”
The bombing that killed Salimi or the , in the south of the country, which caused the death of about 175 people, mostly girls, is evidence that the American and Israeli bombs falling on Iran were not precise enough to prevent the deaths of thousands of civilian victims. The US-based , puts the most recent number of civilian deaths at 1,701, including at least 254 children. In addition to these numbers, the organization records 1,221 military deaths and another 714 unclassified victims.
Doing your job
“My sister was just doing her job. She was doing her shift at a pharmacy. She was Dr. Parastesh Dahaghin: not a number on the news, but a human being, a daughter, a sister.” It is the message that the brother of another victim wrote, in a publication on Instagram shared by the Iranian feminist organization Harasswatch.
Dahaghin was a pharmacist who, like Salimi, also died on March 9 in the bombings in the Apadana neighborhood, in the western part of Tehran, a few kilometers from the capital’s airport. According to Harasswatch, his brother says that Dahaghin did not want to leave his job because he considered it a way to help the wounded. The pharmacy where he worked was near a military building, the target of the attack.
In a densely populated city like Tehran, in which almost 10 million people share an area equivalent to the city of Madrid (where 3.5 million reside), Dahaghin is not the only one who has lost her life in attacks intended to cause “pure destruction,” as Hegseth said.
Berivan Molani, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, was killed by shelling on March 17 while she was in her parents’ apartment in the Zafaraniyeh district, north of Tehran. His bedroom was hit in the attacks that killed him. In a video shared by Harasswatch, you can see that, when Molani’s mother is rescued alive from the rubble, the first thing she does is ask about her daughter; but Berivan was already dead.
Molani had returned to his parents’ house just the night before his death. Her friends urged her to stay in northern Iran, believing it was safer, but Molani wanted to be close to her parents. This is what her friend Razieh Janbaz, former player of the Iranian handball team, says in a post on Instagram.
Moradi, from Hengaw, explains that the situation of civilians had become even more vulnerable due to the total absence of alerts or warnings from the Government. There were almost no sirens or warnings telling the population when to evacuate a place or area, or safe places to go. He also comments that he received many stories from people who spent sleepless nights because they did not know what could happen. “You’re just waiting at home, with all those sounds around you, and you feel completely alone,” he describes.
Although Tehran has been the most affected area of the country, civilians in other regions did not escape the attacks either. Shayan Mam Salimi was a teenager of just 15 years old when he was killed during a bombing raid by Israeli and American fighter jets in the city of Bukan, on March 4. According to Hengaw, multiple missile attacks on the governor’s office and surrounding areas in the city center left at least two other civilian casualties and 57 people injured.
“People keep talking about a very powerful, extremely terrifying air attack,” Moradi narrates. “I keep thinking about him.” [Shayan]. I saw his profile on Instagram and how young he was, and the way he talked about the future,” Moradi says.
It has not been the only case that has impacted his work. He also couldn’t stop thinking about a 30-year-old woman who was pregnant and died along with her husband and four-year-old son, in the rural area of Marivan, in the northwest of the country. Her name was Mitra Jalilavi and she was preparing to leave her home and go to a hospital in Sanandaj with her husband, 34-year-old Farzad Bazargan.
His home was near a Revolutionary Guard garrison. “They died in the air attack just as they were preparing, gathering their things, ready to leave the city. They died immediately inside their home. Really… it was very hard, very difficult to assimilate,” Moradi narrates. Jalilavi was in the ninth month of pregnancy.
Journalist Negin Bagheri, who is in Iran, wrote the story of two girls who died in an attack that hit a sports center and an adjacent primary school near a military installation in Lamerd, southern Iran, on the first day of the war. Of the 21 people killed, two were Helma Ahmadizadeh and Elham Zaeri. “Since that day,” Bagheri writes in X, “the two girls have been reduced to a single line: two young volleyball players from Lamerd.” Fourth-grader Helma was just ten days away from blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. Elham, a fifth grader, would have celebrated her birthday a month later.
