The school in Minab, Iran, that was purportedly hit erroneously by U.S. forces during the opening salvo of the war is on an “active IRGC cruise missile base,” CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper said.
The U.S. military is investigating whether it was responsible for a strike that occurred on Feb. 28, the first day of the war, that killed more than 150 people, a majority of whom were school children. In the aftermath of the strike, the military initiated an investigation led by an outside investigating officer, whose identity has not been shared publicly.
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Multiple Democrat lawmakers raised questions about the strike during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday, where Cooper was among the witnesses.
Early on, ranking member Adam Smith (D-WA) said, “It’s really pretty clear what happened there, but 80 days on, we have not taken responsibility for that attack,” and he asked, “Can you at this moment acknowledge that that mistake was made?”
When Cooper referred back to the investigation, Smith responded, “So that’s a no, we will not take responsibility for something we very obviously did.”
Cooper then said, “It’s a very complex investigation. The school itself is located on an active [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] cruise missile base, so it’s more complex than the average strike.”
Later on in the hearing, he said the investigation is “coming to the end,” but would not share a time frame for when it would conclude. He agreed to publish an unclassified version of the findings.
In a hearing last week, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) asked Cooper about the New York Times’s reporting that the U.S. had bombed 22 schools and 17 healthcare facilities during the war.
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During questioning about the strike on Tuesday, he informed committee members that he and his staff reviewed the 39 strikes in question from the New York Times’s reporting over the weekend and found that the strike on the school was the only one that “correlated” with a U.S. strike.
“I was asked about this last Thursday in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing,” Cooper said. “We spent the weekend, myself and the staff, we looked into all 39 incidents that were outlined in the article. My assessment and our staff confirmed only one of them correlated with a U.S. strike. That was the strike in Minab on the girls’ school. It is an active IRGC base. The other 38 instances did not involve U.S. munitions.”
