I am a child of war and a former refugee. When I was supposed to start school in the early 1990s, a small pink backpack waited by the door of our home in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was meant for my first day of class. I used to look at it for hours, imagining who I would become one day and the friends I would meet in the classroom. But months before that day arrived, Sarajevo was bombed by the Bosnian Serb Army. My family managed to escape before the siege tightened its grip on the city, which would go on to kill and starve thousands of children. I never saw that backpack again.

Instead, I started school in a country that took us in. Years passed, moving between classrooms as a refugee. My father, who stayed behind during the war, told me many years later that he gave away my backpack to other children seeking refuge in our house.

A couple of weeks ago, while watching images from Iran, I saw similar backpacks again.

And those images have not left my mind. Pink ones scattered across rubble. School uniforms covered in dust. The shattered remains of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab. More than 160 people, most of them girls between the ages of 7 and 12, were killed when a missile struck the school during the first wave of bombings in the United States and Israel’s conflict with Iran. For days, weeks, it was unclear what had happened. Whose missile was it? And why so many children had been killed. All sides in the conflict say they "don’t target children."

International officials and humanitarian organizations have since called for a full and independent investigation into the strike. The United Nations has said it is deeply alarmed by the attack and warned that attacks on schools may constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law.

Under the laws of war, schools are protected civilian objects. Deliberately targeting them, or carrying out an attack that causes disproportionate civilian harm, can amount to a war crime.

Those girls went to school and never came home. Harrowing details continue to emerge and reports say some of them were so badly burned that families struggled to recognize them. According to local reports, several were identified only by their backpacks, their school uniforms or the clothes they had worn that morning. Backpacks and notebooks became evidence of who they were.

Every modern war promises precision. Military briefings are filled with terms like "guided munitions,” "surgical strikes” and "target verification.” The promise is always the same: that technology will minimize civilian casualties. Precision strikes are designed to hit exact coordinates using satellite guidance, laser targeting and advanced intelligence verification. Military planners describe them as capable of striking within metres of their intended target, a doctrine meant to reduce unintended harm.

Yet somehow, civilian areas keep being bombarded and filled with the dead. In Minab, missiles struck a school full of children.

Some reports suggest the school stood near a facility previously linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But proximity to a military site does not transform a classroom full of children into a legitimate military objective. Under international humanitarian law, schools remain protected civilian spaces unless they are actively used for military purposes. The children inside them are protected persons.

If the emerging reports about the strike are confirmed, the attack will inevitably be scrutinised under the laws of war.

As someone who grew up in a country shaped by war crimes trials, I know that accountability often arrives slowly.

In Bosnia, many of those responsible for massacres and genocide eventually stood before international courts. Some were convicted decades after the crimes were committed.

Justice came late. For many, it never came, as some war criminals continue to walk freely, protected by those who don't want to speak up and share information with the courts.

And so I cannot help but hope that one day someone will also be forced to answer for what happened in Minab. Wars are often discussed in the language of strategy, deterrence and geopolitics. But accountability begins somewhere else entirely.

It begins with the victims. The girls who walked into a classroom that morning. The families who waited for them to come home.

If the world cannot protect children even in the age of so-called precision warfare, then the next backpacks we see beneath the rubble may belong to children somewhere else. Because we live in an age that celebrates extraordinary human progress. We build artificial intelligence, explore space, map the human genome and develop weapons so precise they can strike a target within metres from thousands of kilometres away.

Yet, in that same age of technological achievement, more than 160 girls were killed in a single moment inside a school. This attack is one of the deadliest strikes on schoolchildren in the modern history of the Middle East.

If this is what progress looks like, then the tragedy of Minab forces a far more uncomfortable question: what does civilization mean if children are still dying beneath the rubble of their schools?