Posted on 03/29/2026 1:05:27 PM PDT by butterdezillion
Bellingcat's analysis of the strike in Minab on Feb 28th doesn't make sense. At https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03/08/video-shows-us-tomahawk-missile-strike-next-to-girls-school-in-iran/ they show a video of a Tomahawk hitting an IRGC facility. Aerial photos show the blast field for that hit and bellingcat draw a red frame around that blast field. That shows the school outside the blast zone and they also say that the Tomahawk only hit a "clinic" and an earth-covered "magazine or bunker".
The first paragraph says the video shows a Tomahawk hitting an IRGC facility.
People on Bluesky used this to claim that the Tomahawk hit the school, but this shows the hit on the IRGC facility did NOT hit the school.
Iranian state media released video footage of bombs, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6FLJ-h8WRs
The regime footage shows one view where they point out a large explosion (hitting the school), followed by 98 smaller explosions - each a significant distance from the other. Then at 1 minute they switch to a different vantage point and show the school explosion again - again, much larger than any of the other 8 explosions and significantly to the other side of the IRGC communications tower that is inside the IRGC complex. At 1:14 you can see the Tomahawk at the top of the screen and then a concise, smaller explosion on the military complex - the explosion that Bellingcat analyzed. There was not a similar Tomahawk swooping close before the school explosion.
Maybe somebody in the military can comment on the difference in the size of these blasts. 8 blasts are similar in size but the one at the school was much bigger.
I've learned that this was near the Strait of Hormuz, and it seems that Bellingcat says there was something buried there - my guess is munitions used for controlling Hormuz. The tall communications tower would also have been an important military asset. Iran had to know that the Hormuz area would be critical and would likely be hit.
The theory right now is that the US military didn't update their info when the school was created in 2014 so they didn't know the building had been converted to a school. Obviously, the military is investigating what happened.
But at https://x.com/kusha_alagband/status/2034380764301975885 an X poster named Kusha tells what one of her long-time trusted followers heard when her cousin was finally able to contact her. He is the uncle of a girl killed in Minab and said that there was still a satellite on the roof of that school and that the IRGC-aligned families did not send their kids to school that day. The "clinic" nearby still had 2 missile launchers in it. This uncle said the people in that area believe that the IRGC shot a missile using one of those launchers to hit the school.
Another x poster (at https://x.com/Farida98479017/status/2034383427961840101 ) posted video of an Iranian girl who said when she got to school the teachers acted funny so she asked what was wrong. She was told there was war but they didn't want the kids to worry. This girl and her friends tried to go to the basement to get their little brothers and take them home but the door was locked for the first time ever. The girl escaped but her younger brother was killed, trapped in the basement. If you look at that conversation I asked for a summary of the video because I don't do Instagram & couldn't see it, so a (non-verbatim) transcript is there in the replies.
Another poster on Kusha's original thread noted anomalies with the exif data, etc of the photos claimed to be the only photos of the damage from the strike. He is very skeptical of the claims - regardless of who hit the school. His post is at https://x.com/OzzyManReviews/status/2032239700057170320
I approach this subject with fear & trembling because I am not good at 3D analysis & know nothing of military operations or weapons. Also, even if we did hit that school, there being the satellite on top of it makes it a legitimate military target. I strongly doubt we would have targeted it if we knew it was a school. But the things the actual witnesses say suggest that the IRGC people knew not to send their kids to school. So the only kids killed were anti-regime kids. By the time the school was hit, the government had already told schools to send the kids home, and obviously the teachers there knew there had been strikes and yet somebody locked those little boys in the basement so nobody could get them out.
I spend quite a bit of time on x these days working to mow down the lies. The leftists ALWAYS bring up Minab to say we're the bad guys. I'd be interested to hear feedback regarding the anomalies I've mentioned - especially from military folks.
Was that analysis on a FR thread? I remember seeing a title but I didn’t look at it because I thought I’d be too dumb to understand it. Maybe I can hope there are some decent keywords I can find in a search.
It’s been well established it was our Tomahawks. Yes, we would know. And we do know.
“We’re investigating” means “we don’t want to talk about that now.”
They might have actually been investigating how such a targeting error occurred. Rumors have it that it was selected by AI and not checked over by a human before launch, but all kinds of rumors have been floating around.
Where did you get the “locking the boys in the basement” story? And why would there be boys in a girls’ school in Iran?
Oopsies always happen in wars. A few of our oopsies during our bombing of Serbia included a hospital, a refugee column, an apartment bulding, a passenger train ... Want me to go on?
It’s true we don’t deliberately target schools. We are fallible human beings and make mistakes.
No, I don’t think it is well-established. Especially after looking at the video I just gave a link to - which is probably the one you were talking about, xone.
I have a lot of questions, a lot to make sense out of. That video shows from the Bellingcat video (and others) that that aircraft’s shape (position of the wings and the tail silhouette), angle of attack (80+ degrees when a Tomahawk does 70 max), and flight path (going over enemy territory rather than following the international waters to within 50 miles before going above Iranian territory) all say it was not a Tomahawk. It was, instead an Iranian one (can’t remember the exact name).
NYT analysis showed before and after photos. We did do hits there, and they were probably with Tomahawks as the US military said. All the buildings that we hit were either leveled or hit dead-center. The “school” was different though: only hit on one corner.
What Grok has about the layout is false. It said the “school” had a wall around it and was not in the IRGC complex. False. Probably based on NYT, which says that NYT is getting their info from people who lied to them.
It is also said that it was an all-girls school but the interview with the girl who was actually there said there were boys downstairs. I was thinking there was a basement but it turns out the girls were in the upstairs and the boys were on the ground floor. I don’t know how this girl was able to get out and go home; there must have been stairs that bypassed the entrance to the boys’ part of the school. I wish we could interview the kids who were there to clear up some of the questions. But if that girl knew what she was talking about, then the regime even lied about the gender of the students, trying to make a bigger sob story out of it. And NYT, Reuters, etc - and thus Grok - licked it up like it was their own spit.
One of my questions also regards the timing. There was an X (Instagram?) post at noon, local time, on the 28th boasting that they make missiles at that school. The attack supposedly happened before 10:45am local time. By 2pm the same person who posted that they make missiles at the school said that the back of Reza Pahlavi would be broken because they put a school at Minab and made martyrs out of innocent children. The timing doesn’t make sense. I’d like to see the posts in context to try to make sense out of it.
Another question is why we’re even saying that the plane in the Bellingcat video is the one that hit the “school”. Bellingcat’s own analysis says it wasn’t what hit the school - that the smoke from the school being hit was already in the air by the time that plane came and bombed. Looking at the NYT’s before and after pics it is obvious we did a bunch of very accurate hits. But the video from the Iran regime shows the school hit and then 8 other hits - all too far apart to be the hits that made the “after” imagery in the NYT analysis.
The analysis in that video shows there was at least one Iranian missile used. The missiles Iran recorded in their extremely blurry video don’t match the locations of the buildings we bombed, as far as I can tell (my 3D perception isn’t great so somebody else should check it). Did Iran make blurry video of their own missile strikes and try to say it was the US?
Are you a military person? I need to know the credentials of the people I’m talking to, in order to know whether the claims being made are ones the person would have some way of actually knowing.
It’s from my 2nd post:
Post about school-girl’s interview: https://x.com/Farida98479017/status/2034383427961840101
Could you go to 1:55 at https://x.com/angertab/status/2031364124051980450 to see the after-bombing aerial view in Minab..... and then go to the Iranian regime’s video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6FLJ-h8WRs... and analyze whether the 8 missile hits in the Iranian video are close enough and positioned right to be the hits that created that “after” aerial photo from the NYT?
My space/depth perception isn’t good, especially with video, and the video quality is so very, very bad I can’t help but think it was deliberately made so bad... but those missile strikes seem too far apart to me, to be the extremely precise hits that the NYT aerial view shows.
I’d really appreciate it if you could use your expertise to make sense out of this for me.
Thanks!
Missiles, not planes. Duh.
Yes there would be
Whether unclassified I do not know
No question, this isn't one of them.
Retired USMC.
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