The school year in Iran began the way it now must begin: with a bell rung beside a graveyard of a building. The Shajareh-ye Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab was bombed on the very first day of the United States-Israel war on Iran, and one hundred and twenty children were killed there, according to Al Jazeera. The ruins still stand. A new building has been built to take the school’s place, and into it the pupils came — but only for an hour or so, only long enough to hear the bell ring out the start of the new year, and then home again.
An hour. One chime of a bell where a school used to be. Many pupils across the country have missed months of classes since the strikes, and so the ritual is performed in miniature — the ceremony of normal life compressed into sixty minutes, as if the whole blasted business of the war could be folded up and pocketed with the exercise books. A new building has been built in its place — yes — but the old one lies in ruins, and both things are true, and that is the country the children walked into when the bell rang.
Meanwhile, in Gloucestershire
Nine hours’ flying time away, the same war put in an appearance on a country lane in the south of England, where nothing is supposed to happen except rain. On Sunday morning, residents near RAF Fairford — the Royal Air Force base that the United States has been using in its ongoing war on Iran — rang the emergency services to report three “suspicious vehicles which appeared to be travelling towards the air base,” according to a statement from London’s Metropolitan Police. Armed officers moved in and arrested five men on suspicion of the “preparation of a terrorist act.”
British security officials are now exploring “multiple lines of enquiry,” Al Jazeera reports, which is the constabulary’s way of saying that nobody yet knows — or is saying — what the five men in the three vehicles intended, or for whom. What is known is the geometry: three vehicles, one American-used airbase, one war that began with 120 dead children in a Minab classroom and now sends armed police sweeping through the English shires on a Sunday morning before breakfast. The war travels. That is what wars do, whatever the planners promise at the lectern.