The U.S. Errors That Led to the Airstrike on an Elementary School

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Wednesday, American officials conceded what's become increasingly clear from investigative reporting by The Times that the United States military was responsible for the airstrike that destroyed an elementary school in Iran, killing at least a 175 people, most of them small children. Today, my colleagues, Malachi Brown and Julian Barnes, on what led to one of the most devastating military errors in decades. It's Thursday, March 12. Maliki, it feels like in a very real sense, you were among the first people in the world, perhaps outside the military, to understand that this devastating airstrike was likely carried out by The United States with determination that has now been confirmed preliminarily by an American military investigation. Well, Michael, I'm not sure about that, but we suspected that something went terribly wrong as soon as we started looking at it. Well, now that this is no longer a suspicion but something that feels so more or less firm, I wanna go back to when this all happened because the timing of it is important. It happened around the same moment that The US and Israel killed Iran's supreme leader, and all the world's eyes were on that. And this other airstrike was more or less in parallel, but getting a lot less attention at first. But once we all realized what had happened, it was shocking. This was a elementary school blown up by a missile, and a 175 civilians, mostly children, were killed. So I just wanna talk for a moment about the scale of this. Yes. It has devastated Minab, the town where this school was located. Saturday morning is the start of the the week and the school week in Iran. So school was in session. The teachers union there said that over 260 students were in the school at the time. Wow. And most of these kids are aged seven to 12. And according to health officials and the local governor there, most of them were killed in the strike along with teachers, and it really is is absolutely horrific what has happened. Right. It's kind of hard to fathom just how many lives were affected by this. It's just an enormous tragedy. It's absolutely hard to understand and to put yourself in the in their position. I mean, Manab is a small town in in Southern Iran. This has affected the entire community there. Obviously, the direct relatives, but just the pictures coming out of there of the streets thronged for the funerals of these children and their teachers are really heartbreaking. You know, there are pictures of mothers throwing themselves over the open coffins of their children as they're saying goodbye to them. Scores of coffins brought on a procession through the streets. You know, people throwing rose petals at them, showering them with sweets. There were thousands of people out there. And, of course, that aerial photograph that many listeners may have …