March 2026
War Criminals Carry Out AI-Assisted Mass Murder
U.S. Imperialists Massacre
Iranian Girls School
Community members searching for survivors at girls school destroyed by U.S. Tomahawk missile on February 28, killing 175. Trump blamed air strike on Iran, but missile fragments (below) clearly show “Made in USA” markings and logo of Dayton, Ohio manufacturer. (Above: Abbas Zaken / Mehr News, Below: IRIB)
Classes were underway at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, on the morning of February 28 when a missile – part of the opening salvo of U.S. bombardment of the country – slammed into the building. More than 170 students, girls and boys (who were on another floor), and teachers were killed when the roof collapsed. Most of the victims were between the ages of 7 and 12. This massacre has become emblematic of the new face of imperialist warfare: automation of mass murder through the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI).
From the outset of their war to crush the Iranian regime, the United States and Israel have engaged in a relentless campaign of terror bombing, destroying residential areas, medical facilities and other civilian infrastructure. On the first day of the war alone the U.S. carried out nearly a thousand strikes. The Iranian Ministry of Health reports over 1,900 people killed, thousands of civilian buildings have been hit, including 600 schools, while 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced since the war began. By mid-March, the Pentagon listed some 8,000 targets struck (rising to 11,000 by the beginning of April), while Israel reported a similar number of sorties.
To generate such a high volume of targets and speed through what the military refers to as “kill chains” – from finding and tracking a target to firing the weapon and evaluating the result – the Pentagon has relied on Maven Smart System, a platform for integrating large quantities of data running on software from the notorious data analytics company Palantir, and since 2024 has used AI from Anthropic’s Claude chatbot. The Maven/Claude combo was used in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January. After it was reported that they were also used for targeting in the war on Iran, many asked if it was used on the Minab school strike.
The Trump administration attempted to disavow responsibility for the massacre. On March 8, Trump himself, speaking to reporters on Air Force One, disingenuously claimed that Iran bombed the school: “based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran … they’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.” Soon, MAGA (Trump’s Make America Great Again movement) swung into action, claiming this was proven by photographs of an Iran missile misfiring. But the photos were from the northern city of Zanjan, nearly a thousand miles (1,600 km) from Minab.
Investigations by the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all pointed to U.S. culpability for the bomb strike, but Trump doubled down. When the Iranian Mehr News agency published a video showing a Tomahawk cruise missile hitting an adjacent facility of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Trump testily claimed in a press conference that Iran has Tomahawks, which is false. Finally, on March 11, the Pentagon leaked that a preliminary internal investigation found that the U.S. Central Command created the target coordinates for the strike using outdated information from the Defense Intelligence Agency.
That would have to be really outdated information, since the Minab school is clearly shown in satellite images as far back as 2013, and it had clearly been fenced off from the IRGC base for at least a decade. Still, the Pentagon investigators went to great lengths to deny the importance of AI targeting, claiming the attack was “unlikely to have been the result of new technology” and instead can be chalked up to “human error” (New York Times, 12 March). So someone may have signed off on it, but how were the targets generated? Given what’s known about the February 28 strikes, the Maven/Claude AI program was surely involved in the Minab girls school strike.
As we pointed out in our coverage of the U.S./Israel genocidal war on Gaza, the Israeli military’s wholesale use of AI-generated targeting (with programs called Habsora [The Gospel], Lavender and “Where’s Daddy?”) cutting down the approval time for strike targets to roughly 20 seconds, constituted “automated genocide.” (see “Gaza Genocide Made in USA,” The Internationalist No. 73, June-August 2024). With the integration of data analytics and AI into the imperialist war machine, the role of humans increasingly is simply to rubber stamp the decisions already made by machines, increasing the breadth and speed of industrial slaughter.
Newly dug graves for the more than 100 children killed in U.S. air strike on elementary school in Minab, Iran on Day One of U.S./Israel war on Iran. (Photo: Iranian Press Center)
The massacre of the Minab girls’ school came just a day after Trump ordered the Pentagon to terminate its relationship with Anthropic and label it a “supply chain risk,” over the company saying it drew the line at mass domestic surveillance and the development of fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic’s stance and Trump’s vituperation (he called it an “out-of-control, Radical Left AI company”) garnered it some kudos from techno-liberals. But the use of Claude to generate massive lists of targets so long as a human takes a few seconds to OK them and the surveillance of non-citizens don’t cross that threadbare red line.
Meanwhile, with all of the attention to Anthropic and Claude, there has been relatively little protest against Palantir, a sinister outfit that got started with a CIA contract and has worked for the U.S. government ever since. While Senate Democrats have tried to capitalize on the public blowback over the Minab massacre, submitting a letter of protest to Hegseth’s Department of War, at least 22 of the 46 signatories are on the take with money from Palantir. In fact, Palantir’s relationship with the military (as well as DHS/ICE) began during the Obama administration and was subsequently expanded under Trump and Biden.
The Obama administration’s push for the military to adopt the use of unmanned drones was a precursor to the current drive to develop lethal autonomous weapons systems powered by AI. By deploying drones as part of its major escalation of air war in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, Obama increased the devastation wrought by U.S. imperialism, dropping three bombs every hour 24 hours a day throughout 2016. According to the U.S. Army’s own Military Review (May-June 2011), “The drone strikes have already caused well over a thousand civilian casualties, and have had a particular affinity for hitting weddings and funerals.”
The harnessing of technological advancement to automate warfare will only serve to maximize destruction and human suffering – which is its very intention. The combination of AI efficiency with Pentagon lethality inevitably will lead to a skyrocketing of civilian casualties. One look at the genocidal slaughter and hellscape in Gaza, where over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed and the entire strip turned into rubble, will tell you that. Far from an anomaly, cold-blooded murder is a daily reality of U.S. imperialism and both major parties, Democratic and Republican, are responsible for its crimes.
Thousands came out on March 3 for funeral ceremony in Minab carrying Iranian flags and pictures of the victims. (Photo: Mehr News Agency)
There is, of course, another possibility: that the bombing of the girls school may not have been an “error” at all, but a reflection of the moral depravity of those in the Pentagon. After all, Hegseth has bragged that the U.S. is heeding “no stupid rules of engagement” to limit civilian casualties and is raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” And it has now come out that on the same day that the Minab school was struck, the U.S. launched a short-range Precision Strike Missile, never tested in battle, against a sports hall and adjacent elementary school in the city of Lamerd, killing at least 21 people by spraying tiny lethal tungsten pellets.
The Trump administration’s obsession with unleashing the U.S. war machine in an orgy of mass murder reflects the desperation of U.S. imperialism, seeking to regain its frayed global hegemony through sheer terror and proving that it is willing to drag the entire globe into a thermonuclear Third World Ward on its downward spiral. Defeating the U.S./Israeli warmongers in Iran would encourage mass resistance worldwide. A workers boycott of arms to Israel and the Middle East generally can contribute greatly to that effort. Ultimately, to stop the bloodbath requires bringing down the imperialist system, it is necessary to fight for world socialist revolution under the leadership of internationalist communist parties in solidarity with the workers and the oppressed under imperialist and Zionist guns and bombs. ■