Translated Content:
A teachers' meeting was supposed to be held; Samaneh Kamali arrived at school early in the morning, not knowing that there would be no meeting or school in a few hours. The news of her cousin's death caused her to leave school so that she would not be there during the attack. Now, on Teacher's Day, she talks about that day when her "trustees" were left one by one under the rubble of the enemy's attacks, and she returns to school to pull out the bodies of the martyrs.
A fate that did not delay
Kamali went to school on Saturday morning; The first bell rang for Quran class and the teacher was in the classroom, but he was busy preparing for the brainstorming session in the cafeteria. He had been back and forth to the office several times. He was not feeling well, he wanted to cancel the session. The school vice principal initially objected, but finally agreed to postpone the session until tomorrow, but she suddenly regretted it and said that the session should be held, because there might not be a tomorrow.
She had returned to the cafeteria to write down her notes when suddenly a message appeared on his phone, “Her aunt [wife of her uncle] has passed away.” Without informing the school staff, she took the car key and left the school, even leaving her chador and personal belongings in the classroom. The vice principal asks where she is going? He replies: “I will go until the children’s Quran class is over, then I will come back.”
Kamali drives herself to the hospital. At that moment, her colleague called her and said that she would teach in her class instead of her and that she would not have to come to school today: “My colleague insisted that I not go. After the hospital, I headed to school, and when I was near the school, my colleague called again and said, “Samaneh, I taught math, you can rest today.”
This time, Kamali turned around and went home.
A student who survived by sleeping in
Samaneh’s son was also a student at the same Shajreh Tayyiba school who slept in on the day of the incident and did not go to school: “His father said, ‘He doesn’t want to go to school today.’ He said, ‘I’m on the opposite shift to you, let the child stay home.’ I also put on my black clothes and went to the house of the uncle's wife who was near the school. But at the ceremony, everyone was talking about war, but I said that there would be war in Tehran and there would never be war in Minab.”
It was around 10 am when Samaneh’s sister’s husband was going to go to the city, so Samaneh would take him to the city, drop him off, and then return to the ceremony. Her niece was also a student at Shajare Tayyiba School. At 11 am, she told her sister to go and get her son from school, because the school was closed due to circumstances, but her sister said her father would pick him up.
Samaneh says: “Suddenly, there was a very terrible noise. It threw me like a soccer ball across the house. Pieces of the house were falling and we didn’t understand what was going on. I got up to go out of the hall and they said there was a war and they were striking.”
She continues: “I could see smoke rising, but I thought they were hitting the clinic. The people running along the way were all saying they were hitting the clinic, the car wash, and the teachers’ sheds; no one mentioned the school. I was saying to myself, "Thank God, all the children have gone home by now," but the reality was something else.
Three explosions and a car that blew up
The first explosion occurred at 11:22. The second explosion occurred 25 seconds later, and the third explosion occurred when Samaneh had reached the clinic, and the blast wave completely shook her car up and down, and her car's exhaust exploded.
Samaneh Kamali says: "I didn't understand how I got all the way home. My sons were shaking with fear and thought there had been an earthquake; everything was in disarray, the blast wave was so strong that all the household items fell to the ground. I picked up the children, we left the house, all the roads were closed, the route was a dirt road, I got to the gas station, I didn't know yet that the school was going to be hit, I didn't know, I just found out that the clinic and the car wash were going to be hit, and they were saying that the war had started now and that they were going to hit the whole of Minab."
The call that ruined my world
She was in line at the gas station when her phone rang; a man asked:
- "Are you Ms. Kamali? Where are you stuck under the rubble?
+ What rubble? What are you talking about?
- Aren't you a teacher at Shajareh School? Don't you know?
+ What happened?
- The school was hit and destroyed..."
Kemali describes those moments as follows: "At that moment, I felt very sick. I didn't even realize I was on the ground. I screamed and hit myself in the head so much that people in the gas line opened the way for me to get out of the car. A man gave me gas for his car. My children and family were following me."
Kamali drove to the school principal's house, Ms. Taheri. There, she saw people gathered, hitting themselves on the head and crying. One of the parents of the students was a neighbor of the school principal, and upon seeing Kamali, she hugged him and shouted: “Thank God you’re alive. Where is my Maryam? I trusted you with her in the morning. Tell me what happened to the school?”
As she was crying, one of her friends approached her and hugged her and said:
“- Samaneh, can you bear to tell me something?
+Tell me what happened?
- Ms. Taheri is gone; your colleagues are gone; the children are gone; the school is gone.”
“At that moment, the world was spinning around me. I was just screaming and crying. The streets leading to the school were blocked. There was no way I could get to the school; I couldn’t put them in the car because I had a small child.”
Karbala in Minab; Searching for Bodies in the Rubble
Many relatives and friends did not know that Kamali was not at school that day and thought that her son, a student, was trapped in the rubble, so they searched for them until nightfall; by then, the cell phone antennas had been completely cut off.
The antennas had been cut off until nightfall, and according to Kamali, the city had turned into the “desert of Karbala.” When the phones were restored, only the families of the students called Kamali and said, “Where is my daughter? Where is my child? They were calling me from everywhere you can think of. I just answered the phone. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know who was alive, who was there and who was not.”
At two or three in the morning, Kamali realized that his own niece was also among the martyrs and that no trace of her body had been found. Her sister's husband, who had gone to school to pick up his child, was martyred in the second explosion with the agency driver as they were leaving the school.
Minabi Teacher says: "All our hope was that they might still be under the rubble. There were rumors that some teachers were in the prayer room. In the morning, someone called us and said that someone had seen Amir Ali and his father in the school yard during the explosion, and that they were both martyred. My uncle went to the school yard and found Amir Ali's father's shoes."
Kamali continues with tearful eyes: "They called me and said that if I could bear it, I should go to school; the bodies were in pieces; hands; feet; heads; it was really Karbala.."
A story of sacrifice; a teacher who shielded the children and the student survived
Amidst this tragedy, Kamali tells of the sacrifice of a teacher: "The school's sports teacher sent some students down at the moment of the first explosion, but she herself got stuck between the bars. She shielded the children with her body. The bar hit her back and she was martyred due to a concussion, but the student she shielded survived. It is true that they say that teachers are the second mother. The teachers could have saved themselves at that moment; the second explosion hit the school 25 seconds later, but the teachers preferred saving the children to themselves.”
A class that will never be complete
The Shajareh Tayyiba school had two floors. The boys were on the ground floor and the girls were on the top floor. The courtyards were also separate. It had a very large complex with a well-equipped clinic, a car wash, a car repair shop, four teacher sheds, a furniture and household appliance manufacturing center.
Kamali says about the student statistics: “The school included a preschool and a girls’ and boys’ school with a total of 403 students. 283 students are alive and 120 students were martyred along with 26 school staff. Only 10 of the school staff survived. The other martyrs were parents who had come after their children. 47 female students were martyred. The most martyrs in a class were from my class. 10 of my students were martyred. Four were healthy and one was seriously injured with burns. 73 male students were martyred.”
Minab’s teachers were not “official”
Kamali emphasizes that the school was semi-government and under the supervision of the Navy: “Classes were from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.; all 36 school staff were contract workers and none of us were official. The founder of the school is alive, but two principals were martyred, but we kept the school’s education light on.”
Now, Ms. Kamali’s class has 22 students; 12 girls and 10 boys. The rest were martyred.