Translated Content:
On the evening of Saturday, March 26, Elham, Helma, and the girls of the Noonhalan volleyball team were taking steps in the gym, hitting the ball hard to defend the ball; not the missile that had come towards their net a few minutes earlier.
Twenty minutes before the end of class, at 5:10 p.m., they were circling the coach in the middle of the gym to learn a new drill when the first rocket hit a base near them. The second rocket exploded in the sky right above the heads of the 26 girls, and the third hit the field around the city of Lamerd about 200 meters ahead of the gym. From these white lines and the sound of the storm that the missiles fired at their city of 44,000 people, 21 people were martyred.
One of these 21 people was named Helma and the other was named Elham; the same two girls who had only been said one sentence about them since March 26: two volleyball girls from Lamerd. Helma Sadat Ahmadizadeh, a fourth-grader, was supposed to blow out the candles on her cake in ten days. Elham Zaeri, a fifth-grader, was due to have her birthday a month later. Another member of Helma's family has also been caught up in the war. She is the cousin of Zahra Ahmadizadeh, a member of the national women's soccer team who, after a controversial trip to Australia, is now stuck in Malaysia with the team, waiting for the borders to open.
Leaving the 50-meter hall in 10 seconds
The coach of the Lamerd volleyball school recounts that day step by step: With the sound of the first explosion, the power in the hall went out. Everyone, everywhere, was trying to find the exit in the twilight, which had already turned dark. The coach was shouting: “Everyone, get out. Get out.” But the second rocket didn’t give them time to evacuate. How could they reach the exit in 10 seconds from a 50-meter-long hall? As the children were running away, the second rocket exploded in the middle of the path, right above the sky of the club. Its shrapnel from five meters above the ground tore through the ceiling and hit the volleyball players of the Lamerd Youth Hall in Fars Province. The flames of the hall were visible from outside, and the smoke filled the small eyes of all the tall and half-tall girls in the second to fifth grades of the team.
Elham’s brother arrived before the ambulance, found Elham among the girls, and put her in the car with bloody hands and feet. The doctors had said that her beloved had died right there before the hospital. Elham's father says that his daughter had many dreams of becoming a volleyball player. With her height and build, she could answer the serves of her older brothers and amaze them.
Helma had boarded the ambulance on her own. Without a single stain of blood on her body, she had fled the gym with the others and had only told her coach: "It's like something has gone into my body." She had pulled up her dress. Something that looked like a small razor that didn't look like a very serious wound.
The girls, who had been gasping for breath after a hard workout minutes earlier, had lost their breath in the hospital out of fear. 10 to 12 of them underwent surgery that night at Lamerd Hospital. One of the girls' fingers had been amputated. Three were sent to Shiraz by emergency. The head and back of the coach's hand were broken, and the skin on the throat and side of the assistant coach's neck was torn. But Helma was the furthest from death. According to her uncle, the same small black blade had gone into her heart, and at around 7 p.m., the nurse’s attempts at CPR failed to bring her back to life.
What happened to others: Three workers, several students, several housewives, a doctor, and an employee
Not only these two female athletes, but also Ilya Hatami, a sixth-grade boy, and his coach Farhad Najafi, who were playing on the grass next to the soccer club, also lost their lives to shrapnel.
The third missile that hit the Lamerd perimeter that day also killed three workers, two of whom were working: one from the same city, the other from Mamasani, and the third from Afghanistan. The housewife, who, according to southern customs, was sitting at home with her hookah at that moment, now has one name left on the list of Lamerd martyrs. A grocery store vendor, a Norwegian pedestrian who was shopping at a pharmacy, the deputy customs officer of the Lamerd Special Zone, and several students were also killed in the explosion. The director of the MRI department at Lamerd Hospital had just arrived home from work that day when he heard the sound and threw himself on his daughter. The daughter survived, but the mother did not. The brother of one of the victims is another student who had his spinal cord severed and is still unaware of his sister's death.
From the impact point of the second and third missiles, it can be said that these two missiles did not hit the military area, but rather two civilian and heavily trafficked areas.
A female student was also blinded by the explosion. Another citizen said that the black shrapnel from the explosion entered her body like a blade and, just like what hit Helma, crushed their bones even though it was not visible.
The attack on Lamerd is also fraught with ambiguity in two ways: the second missile hit the western end of the club, and the third missile, 200 meters west of it, hit the Lamerd belt itself, unjustly killing many citizens.
From the point of impact of the second and third missiles, it can be said that these two missiles did not hit the military area, but rather two civilian and busy areas. Among them was the volleyball team of the 1990s, 10 of whom were supposed to enter the field for the provincial tournament after the end of the exam season. Everyone wanted to practice in the spring, attack in the summer for the make-up tournament, cheer each other loudly, go to the podium at the end of the festival and dream of the world championships by raising the trophy above their heads.