Places that are bombed are real places

You’ve probably heard about the horrific Israeli/US strike on an all‑girls elementary school in Minab, Iran, which killed well over a hundred people, mostly students. I had never heard of Minab, so I looked it up.

Minab is a city of around 73,000 people in the Hormozgan province, which is on the coast of the Persian Gulf.

The climate is hot and dry but it’s an agricultural region, comparable to the Imperial Valley of southern California, though hotter. Crops in the surrounding region include citrus, dates, tomatoes, mangoes, tobacco, barley and wheat.

The city is known for embroidery, weaving and pottery. The population is a diverse mix of Arabs, Persians, Balochs and sub-Saharan Africans. The dialect they speak is called Garmsiri, and it’s part of the Indo-European language family, like most of the languages of Europe.

People have been living in the region since at least 550 BC. Hezareh Castle was built in the first century CE. The city was destroyed during the Mongol Invasion, and the castle is the only structure that survived. Starting in the 1500s, the area was colonized and fought over by European powers looking to control the Strait of Hormuz, still a vital trade route through which 20% of the world’s oil supply passes.

Besides the castle, Minab’s Thursday bazaar is probably its most famous attraction.

The city holds a Mango and Jasmine Flower Thanksgiving festival every year. I couldn’t find a working link to a page that discusses it. Could this be because the sites all had domains ending in .ir for Iran? Even using a VPN didn’t work. So much for the open internet, I guess. Here’s a video on YouTube though.

The province is mountainous highland, rising right from the ocean, with little to no coastal plain. Some watercourses are seasonal, becoming marshy during the rainy season, and drying out to leave salt deposition afterwards. Where the Minab river empties into the Persian Gulf, there is a Mangrove ecosystem. For details about plants in the area, check out “Preliminary Notes on the Vegetation of Hormuzgan (Southern Iran).”

On iNaturalist, 146 species observations are recorded in the vicinity of the city. Many species of bird are at home in the area including the Sind Woodpecker, Greater Spotted Eagle, Spotted Owlett, Black Storck, Caspian Ternand White-throated Kingfisher.

Like I said, I’d never heard of Minab before today. What I found in just a few minutes of searching was that this is yet another beautiful corner of the world with its own intriguing human and more-than-human denizens. Exotic perhaps, but not alien because nothing on this planet is. Like everywhere else, it would be far better off without war.

What MLK said about the US government in 1967 is still true today: it is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” When we hear about military strikes like the one that slaughtered so many innocents in Minab, we should take a moment to remember that the victims are regular people like ourselves, human in all the same ways we are. Likewise, the places they live are real, with their own plants and animals and geology and climate. None of this life deserves to be subjected to bombs.