Two Worlds in Conflict
A Reflection on Episode 4, Still Minab
I have been writing a series of reflections after each episode of the Still, Minab documentary series. Helyeh Doutaghi, a close comrade and collaborator of mine, has been at the lead in making the documentary, serving as researcher, writer, and narrator.
As the name suggests, the documentary series centers each episode on the story of one family impacted by the US massacre committed against a children’s school at Minab. It took me some time to complete this reflection, as the episode impacted me deeply and provoked some historical and philosophical connections and reflections. As such, the piece became much longer than previous reflections, and so I have decided to make this my first substack post.
This reflection is in the process of being integrated with Helyeh’s writings based on her on the ground research in Minab. We will subsequently produce a longer form academic article clarifying and analysing the historical significance of the genocidal intent that lay behind the US strikes on the children’s school in Minab. The article will be done soon. If there are journal editors interested in reviewing and publishing it, please feel free to reach out.
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Two Worlds in Conflict: A Reflection on Episode 4, Still Minab
As the Still, Minab series unfolds, we continue to encounter the stories and worlds of Minab that were, from one angle, stolen by the US-Zionist death machine, and from another, sacrificed by Minab’s martyrs in service of a liberated future, centered on love, justice, and the truest solidarity that makes us human.
A reminder, again, of what is at stake. Behind multiple tomahawk strikes on a children’s school, an existential conflict between two worlds, two histories, and two futures that stand before us.
In what follows in this reflection, a clarification is offered of the terms of this existential conflict, the deeper history and broader geography of this collision of worlds. Minab is not collateral damage, the resistance of its people is not incidental. This is a struggle that has been waged for centuries, picked up, sustained, and transmitted again by Minab’s martyrs.
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In this episode, we encounter the “selfless martyr” Ahmad Salari, who sacrificed his life trying to rescue children at the school, even after he had already brought his child to safety. A sacrifice, then, not just for the children, but for a fundamental principle, a truth: what sort of life is it that distinguishes between children, that would allow one to witness and leave “other” children to death and injury simply because they are not one’s own? In this way, Ahmad’s “selfless martyrdom” stands against how too many in the West have passively witnessed the deliberate slaughter of children enacted by the US-Zionist death machine from Gaza to Lebanon to Minab.
We encounter Ahmad through the words of remembrance offered by his father Agha Ghasem. A remembrance of Ahmad as a leader of his family, a leader of his brothers and father. When his father spoke of a need for their own home in Bander Abbas, it was Ahmad who stayed with this father’s wish, even as challenges and setbacks made it seem impossible. Ahmad remained committed, quietly working to secure the house, which he finally did in the time leading up to his martyrdom. A distinct form of leadership from what we may be familiar with.
It is here we must slow down, pause even, and allow this “other” world to enter our own, to potentially remake our own, revolutionize our world. And, in humility, we enter the world of the other in order to learn from it, and to thus come to know one another and forge relations across difference.
For Ahmad, we see, did not lead in order to impose himself, and his interests, on others. His leadership was grounded in humble service, not imposition. A promise, in fact, that reverses leadership as imposition: here, it is the interests of others, those he loves and those who love him, that Ahmad leads the way in advancing. A leadership grounded in a willingness by Ahmad to sacrifice his own individual interests to make more space for the flourishing of the lives around him. This is what a world centered on love looks like. It is in this promise to lead through serving the lives of others that we can recognize and understand how Ahmad was moved to risk, and ultimately sacrifice, his life rescuing children, even after he had secured the lives of his own children.
It is the same model of selfless leadership, of selfless martyrdom, with which Seyed Ayatollah Ali Khamanei sacrificed his life for the people of Iran on the first day of this war.
This is the highest expression of love, the courage it instils in pure hearts. For what is love if not a giving of oneself to the making and flourishing of that which one loves? And how could such love instil anything but courage to protect and serve what one wishes to see flourish?
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Ahmad’s life was taken by a second US tomahawk missile that was fired as the rescuers and responders worked frantically to move the children to safety. A contrast that could not be sharper. Against Ahmad’s courageous, embodied defence of the children of Minab, a cowardly, detached system, devoid of humanity. Cyborgs, operators in control rooms thousands of miles away, firing missiles at Iranians when they identify them to be at their most vulnerable, taking grotesque advantage of the most tender expressions of what it means to be human.
The heartless logic of the second strike was that more Iranians could be killed as they would have let down their guard and gathered in a way that made them even more vulnerable to mass casualties. Feel, then, what is at stake in this battle, a world centered on the heart, on love and courage, against a heartless world, centered on profit, gain, and murder.
Who or what was it that Ahmad encountered as he was trying to rescue the children? What were the forces capable of even conceiving, let alone launching, a second Tomahawk missile at a children’s school?
The answer begins with Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. Against the selfless leadership of Seyed Khamanei and Ahmad Salari, we have Trump, who can only understand leadership as an imposition of one’s interests on others, threatening to eliminate Iranian civilization. It is, however, in the person of Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of war, that we really grasp, with clarity, the logic of the genocidal evil that lies behind the second strike. In the days following the massacre at Minab, Hegseth affirmed his guiding logic, proclaiming that:
“The only ones who need to be worried right now are Iranians who think they are going to live.”
A clear statement of the genocidal intent that lay behind the second strike.
What type of past, sustaining what type of world, gives rise to a monster like Hegseth? What sort of future would a world led by the system birthing Trumps and Hegseths lead us into?
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In trying to more clearly reveal the truth of the evil guiding the second strike at Minab, the past of the US wars in the region flashes in front of us.
As we asked ourselves, how could Hegseth, even as genocidal as he sounds, have authorized a second strike on those trying to save the wounded, the answer presents itself through recollection of the Wikileaks video, Collateral Murder, which showed the gruesome attack by US soldiers on unarmed civilians in Iraq on July 12, 2007. This attack occurred in the fifth year of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
A US Apache helicopter circled a group of Iraqi men, among whom were two journalists working for Reuters. The US invaders piloting the helicopter presented Iraqi men walking the streets of their own country as threats, asked for permission to fire, were quickly granted permission, and proceeded to fire multiple artillery rounds upon the men, massacring seven, including the journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen. They hunted Namir down and blew his body to pieces. These are the words of the US invaders as they congratulated one another after murdering seven men:
“Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards”
“Nice”
“Good shot”
“Thank you”
The second journalist, Saeed Chmagh, survived the attack, but was badly wounded. As he struggled to find safety, the US invaders continued to circle him in their helicopter, looking for justification to fire again and complete their murderous rampage.
They found their justification when Saleh Matasher Tomal, who had been driving his van with his two children inside, stopped to try to help the wounded Saeed. Saleh, like Ahmad Salari, selflessly risked his life to try to save the life of his fellow countryman. The US invaders helming the Apache helicopter requested permission to fire upon the rescuers, were granted permission, and unleashed hell once again, murdering Saleh and Saeed and wounding the two children.
The US soldiers reflecting on what they have done:
“I think we whacked [killed] ‘em all”
“That’s right, good”
“I didn’t want those fuckers to run away and scatter”
“Roger, I’ve got 11 Iraqis KIA (killed in action). One small child wounded. Over”
“Ah damn. Oh well.”
“Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle”
“That’s right”
Later, the US army would declare that “We don’t know how the children were hurt.”
Here we see the epitome of cruelty informing the second strike, the genocidal logic with which the Apache pilots see, as easy prey, those seeking to rescue the wounded. Do the motives of the Apache pilots, and the command room giving them authorization, explain for us the second strike that murdered Ahmad Salari at Minab?
Pete Hegseth, the current war secretary who oversaw the Minab massacre, was an invading soldier in Iraq. He boasted in his recent book, “The War on Warriors,” that he instructed men under his command in Iraq to ignore the Geneva conventions and kill anyone they deemed to be a threat. He praised, as a “certified badass,” his former commanding officer, Michael Steele, who ordered US soldiers to kill all “military-aged” Iraqi males during a raid.
In September 2025, a US missile strike on a boat in the Caribbean killed 9 people, leaving two survivors clinging to the boat. Hegseth, now the war secretary, has been alleged to have issued orders to kill everybody. A subsequent second strike killed the two remaining survivors.
No one has been held to account for the strike on the boat in the Caribbean, nor for the massacre committed by those manning the Apache helicopter in Baghdad. In fact, we still do not even know the names of the killers.
We see the reality, then, of what the US military has always been, and we grasp the logic behind the second missile strike on the children’s school at Minab.
“Kill everybody.”
“I don’t want those fuckers to run away and scatter.”
“It’s their fault for bringing their children into a war zone.”
The second strike at Minab was not an accident, nor was it an aberration. In all its horror, it represents a long-standing rule, applied time and again, by the agents of colonialism and imperialism. When those they seek to subjugate refuse, when they resist, the colonizer and imperialist turn to a genocidal slaughter of the unarmed, taking a particularly cruel pleasure in targeting those who would dare seek to rescue the wounded. Taking pleasure in targeting their children, so that they might surrender to US imperialism.
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This genocidal rule - to kill everybody, the unarmed, the rescuers, children - we must also remember, is not an outcome of the excesses of recent wars, or the War on Terror. It is the foundation of the US as a settler-colony and an imperialist system.
The Apache helicopter terrorizing the people of Baghdad took “Crazy Horse” as its call name. This name is an appropriation that can only be described as twisted and demented, revealing the moral rot at the foundation of US imperialism. The truth of the man and the people behind the name opens further dimensions of the deep history and broad geography of the two worlds in conflict in Minab.
Crazy horse is taken from the name of the famed Indigenous Lakota warrior who led his people in armed struggle against US colonizers across the Great Plains in the mid-late nineteenth century. He led the Indigenous resistance to victory against the colonizers on multiple occasions, including most famously the defeat imposed upon Custer’s army at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The US army responded to their failure to defeat Indigenous armed resistance by laying siege on the Sioux people and their allies from the Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho nations. The US used starvation tactics, scorched earth campaigns, and systematic slaughter of the unarmed. This culminated in the Wounded Knee Massacre, a massacre that included the US army hunting down and murdering men, women, and children who were attempting to find refuge from the terror.
Crazy Horse himself was killed while resisting the occupier, seeking to wrestle the bayonet away from his would be captor. A spirit and tradition of resistance renewed when Yahya Sinwar resisted in Gaza until his final breath, throwing a stick, while wounded, at the israeli drone that came to kill him.
What we see today in Gaza, zionism’s inability to subdue Al-Aqsa flood, and its subsequent recourse to scorched earth, starvation, and systematic slaughter, has been a rule of this imperialist system for centuries.
Wounded Knee, Baghdad, Gaza, Minab.
Against the terror, across time and space, has stood the selfless leadership and martyrdom of Crazy Horse, Yahya Sinwar, Seyed Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, and Ahmad Salari.
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Against the world of the colonizer and imperialist, the one that rains double tap strikes from Gaza to Iraq to Lebanon to Minab, another world struggles for victory - a world rooted, Agha Ghasem insists, in a shared humanity of true human beings.
Agha Ghasem uncovers this world for us in the solidarity demonstrated across the resistance fronts, how the peoples of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, have stood together in the face of the escalation of genocidal terror. Ghasem insists that “our support for them comes from our shared humanity, and it is their humanity that drives them to help us.”
What is the basis of this shared humanity of which Agha Ghasem speaks?
The answer is found when he declares “that is a true human being” when speaking of those sacrificing in support of Iran’s resistance, from Pakistani girls donating their jewelry in honor of the victims of Minab to the armed resistance in Lebanon and Iraq who have fought alongside the Islamic Republic of Iran. Across the resistance front, we see a humanity rooted in sacrifice for one another, bearing costs - from sanctions to bombardment - to stand with whoever is being targeted by the US-Zionist death machine.
Agha Ghasem reminds us of an eternal truth. To be human is to sacrifice for the principle and cause of truth and justice. To sacrifice for the lives of others struggling against injustice as a most profound expression of love. It recalls the Palestinian revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani’s words:
“Self-sacrifice, within the context of revolutionary action, is an expression of the very highest understanding of life and of the struggle to make life worthy of a human being.”
This is a world of a shared humanity, rooted in sacrifice, centered on love. Its struggle is timeless, yet Aime Cesaire long ago promised that this world of a shared humanity was destined to meet “where no race holds a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength, and there is room for everyone at the rendez-vous of victory.” The question before all of us today is whether we will continue to simply witness this struggle, or whether we will allow it to enter and transform our own worlds, and whether we can enter with humility into this world itself, to learn from it, and to join this shared humanity in its march to victory or death.
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It is this question that Helyeh Doutaghi, the researcher, writer, and narrator of the Minab series, puts to us in her closing narration. She draws a distinction between revolutionary societies and colonial societies rooted in genocide. The latter, she argues, are centered on fear and cowardice. The hyper-individualistic, profit-seeking, consuming culture of Western capitalism lacks real love and solidarity. In its absence, the isolated individual of the West, atomized in space and time, constantly fears that everything can be taken away from them by the oppressors who hold power over them. Here, then, in the place of sacrifice stands cowardice. As Doutaghi make clear:
“Where societies are conditioned to prioritize material comfort over sacrifice, and consumption over solidarity, even live-stream genocide can become normalized. This is especially true where populations materially benefit from systems of domination, dispossession, and war carried out by their governments.”
We witnessed Iraq, and some of us promised we would never accept rewards from a society that could commit such atrocities with impunity. Yet, as the years went on, we forgot about the atrocities and the impunity held. We accepted the material rewards. The authors of those crimes, and the system they uphold, would generate further atrocities, culminating in openly displaying to us the widespread systematic slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. We witness Gaza, and again we promise – Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Minab – to endlessly struggle against the system that authors these atrocities.
For this promise to be realized it is us who must be revolutionized, by opening ourselves up to imbibe the selfless spirit of Ahmad Salari. The martyrs in the struggle against imperialism ascend and become the oxygen we must inhale and metabolize so that we might join them at the rendez-vous of victory.