The bombs did not discriminate. They fell on Tehran, on Isfahan, on the crowded bazaars and the small homes tucked into the mountains. The US and Israeli campaign against Iran, launched three days ago, has left thousands dead. But the true number, the precise count of bodies pulled from rubble, may never be known. The hospitals are overwhelmed. The internet is patchy, cut in places. The government's own figures are chaotic, contradictory. Iran's state media now speaks of over 4,000 dead, but aid workers on the ground whisper of far more. They speak of entire families buried under collapsed apartment blocks. They speak of children pulled from the wreckage of a school near Natanz. The sickening truth is that this is not a surgical strike. It is a war of attrition on a civilian population.
In the city of Ahvaz, a missile hit a residential area near the oil refinery. The blast was felt miles away. My colleague, a reporter for a regional news agency, managed to speak to a doctor at the local hospital. The doctor, his voice shaking, said they had run out of space in the morgue. Bodies were being stored in a refrigerated lorry. He did not know how many. He could not keep count.
The official narrative from Washington and Tel Aviv is of targeted strikes against nuclear and military installations. But the evidence from the ground tells a different story. Satellite images show large craters in civilian neighborhoods. The UN has reported that at least 500 women and children have been killed in the first 48 hours alone. The true toll, the world may never know. Iran is a country of 88 million people, spread across a vast territory. In the chaos of war, with communications deliberately disrupted, the full horror will remain hidden, unrecorded, a dark stain on the conscience of the nations that unleashed this.
This is what happens when war is not a video game. It is not a precision tool. It is a sledgehammer that smashes the lives of ordinary people. The shopkeeper who cannot open his stall. The mother who cannot find her child. The elderly man who dies alone in a hospital corridor because the staff are overwhelmed. They are the true victims of this conflict, their stories likely to remain untold. And as the bombs keep falling, the world must ask: how many more will die before the silence of 'unknown' becomes the only answer?