Javad Zarif

Today, I stood in Lamerd. I had read the reports. I had studied the forensic reconstructions by Airwars, The New York Times, BBC Verify, the painstaking work on trajectory angles, fragmentation patterns and blast radii. None of it prepared me for standing beneath these walls, or meeting the people who live behind them. Lamerd is a small city of about 30,000 people in Fars province. It is the kind of place where a stranger is offered food before anyone asks his name. I have rarely encountered a community so instinctively and openly hospitable. People who had only recently buried their children still insisted on pouring us tea. That warmth, in the face of what was done to them, is the first thing the world should know about Lamerd. The second is what these walls tell you, if you take the time to look. On February 28, 2026, the opening day of the US-Israeli war on Iran, the United States fired Precision Strike Missiles into this city. Independent forensic reconstruction has identified at least three. Eye witnesses say there were four. The PrSM is not an ordinary missile. It does not simply strike a point on the ground. It detonates in the air, roughly fifteen to twenty metres above the surface, turning the area beneath it into a killing zone. The blast sends tens of thousands of white-hot tungsten fragments in every direction, ripping through walls, cars and human bodies. Investigators counted more than 2,000 individual fragment impacts along a single 150-metre stretch of one residential street. I walked that street today. I did not need the number. I could see it. Look at the photographs. The facades are not simply damaged. They are pocked from roofline to foundation, in a pattern no accident could produce. The asphalt of the schoolyard is covered with hundreds of small grey scars where fragments struck the pavement. Then there is the steel door. The kind of door you would find on any modest home. It has been punched through in a dozen places. Taped above the holes is a photograph of a curly-haired toddler. Her name was Avina Barzegar. She was two years old. She was killed in her family's backyard. This is how the attack was described to us by people who lived through it. A missile struck first, directly above the Shahid Naimi sports hall, where a girls' volleyball team was training. Panic followed. People did what people instinctively do when something explodes nearby: they ran outside, toward the open air, believing that was where they might be safe. That was when the second missile came down. Then a third. Then a fourth. Each detonated over a different part of the same small city: a school, a residential area, places where people had run because they thought the street was safer than the building they had been inside. At least 21 civilians were killed that day, including children as young as two. More than 170 were wounded. Spinal injuries. Amputations. Catastrophic burns. We met the family of a seventeen-year-old girl who lost both eyes. We met the family of another young girl who will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, her spine severed by fragments that fell from a clear afternoon sky. I heard about a little girl who no longer speaks. The trauma and bleeding in her brain took her voice, along with so much of what childhood was supposed to give her. None of these girls carried a rifle. None wore a uniform. Among those killed and maimed in Lamerd, there was not a single member of an armed force, Iranian or otherwise. According to the forensic reconstruction, the missiles were launched from mobile batteries in a Persian Gulf Arab state that hosts American forces, a state that would later condemn Iran when Iran exercised its inherent right of self-defense. And what was Washington's response? It was not that Lamerd contained a military target. No such target has ever been identified by CENTCOM. Instead, the story changed. First, a CENTCOM spokesman flatly said that no American strike had taken place within thirty miles of Lamerd that day. Then footage emerged that could no longer be dismissed. The explanation changed. The missile seen in the footage, they said, was actually an Iranian Hoveyzeh cruise missile. Weapons analysts at Janes and McKenzie Intelligence, along with the visual-forensics teams at The New York Times and BBC Verify, examined the same footage independently. They reached the same conclusion. The silhouette, the mid-air detonation and the fragmentation pattern all pointed to one weapon used in that theater. It was not Iranian. None of this should surprise anyone who has followed this war closely. The PrSM had never been used in combat before February 28. Lamerd was its combat debut. A live-fire demonstration in a civilian city, whose geography apparently made it a convenient proving ground. And by the Pentagon's own measure, the test was a success. Within a month, Lockheed Martin had reached a new agreement with the Department of War to quadruple PrSM production, later reported by independent investigators to be worth some $8.4 billion. Days after the missile killed Avina Barzegar, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper publicly celebrated its combat debut, calling it "an unrivaled deep strike capability." Tell that to the toddler on the door. Iranian civil society will not allow what happened in Lamerd to disappear the way so much of Iraq and Afghanistan disappeared from public memory. Those societies had their bar associations, universities and forensic institutions hollowed out by decades of dictatorship, invasion and war before anyone expected them to build a serious case file. Iran does not face those same constraints. It has tens of thousands of practicing lawyers, a functioning forensic medicine system, land and hospital registries, dozens of law faculties, and a diaspora that includes lawyers admitted to practice in jurisdictions that recognize universal jurisdiction. We will use every one of them. We will pursue Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Adm. Brad Cooper, and every officer who executed their orders, in every forum on this earth that will hear us, for as long as it takes. This is not only Iran's fight. People anywhere, including in the United States and Europe, can do something about it. 1- Pursue universal jurisdiction. If you live in a country that recognizes universal jurisdiction over grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, press prosecutors to open a file. Many of these governments speak constantly about the independence of their judiciaries. This is where that claim gets tested. The legal basis exists. The precedents exist. 2- Demand an end to the contracts: Demand that your government, and any government with a Lockheed Martin contract, cancel it. Every state party to the Geneva Conventions has obligations to "ensure respect" for international humanitarian law. Those obligations do not disappear because a weapons contract is profitable. A company should not be able to field-test a weapon on a residential street and then collect billions of dollars to manufacture more of it. 3- Say their names. Be loud. Organize. Say Avina Barzegar's name. Say the names of the other children killed on that street. Keep saying them until they cannot be forgotten. Let Lamerd become the case that finally forces the world to confront this weapon and ban its use against civilians, so that no city anywhere becomes someone else's proving ground again. And do not accept, for one second, the claim that this is "still under investigation." This is a government that has told the American public that it can read an Iranian officer's name tag from a satellite in orbit. It closed the Lamerd file within days, through denial, without answering the questions raised by BBC Verify, The New York Times or Airwars. An administration with that level of claimed surveillance capability does not need more time to determine who fired four missiles into a city of 30,000 people. It has known since the morning of February 28. It has decided that the truth is inconvenient. Avina Barzegar was two years old. That is why we do not stop.

An Open Letter to @LockheedMartin To James D. Taiclet, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and to the Board of Directors. I have just returned from Lamerd, a city of thirty thousand in Iran's Fars province. On 28 February 2026, the opening day of the American and Israeli war on Iran, United States forces fired Precision Strike Missiles built by your corporation into its residential streets, its school and its sports hall. Twenty-one civilians were killed. More than one hundred and seventy were wounded — among them children who will live the rest of their lives without sight, without limbs, or without the use of their spines. The youngest of the dead was Avina Barzegar. She was two. Her photograph is taped above the fragment holes in her family's steel door. I have stood in front of it. Within a month, your corporation signed an agreement to quadruple production of the weapon that did this, reported at some $8.4 billion. I write because the legal consequences of having done so knowingly are more serious than your officers appear to have been advised. What occurred at Lamerd was a war crime. There was no military objective. Under the customary rule reflected in Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol, an object may be attacked only where it effectively contributes to military action and its destruction offers a definite military advantage. In six months, Central Command has identified no such object in Lamerd. It first claimed no American strike occurred within thirty miles of the city. When video made that untenable, it claimed the munition was an Iranian cruise missile, a claim rejected independently by Janes, McKenzie Intelligence, The New York Times and BBC Verify, each identifying the silhouette, the airburst and the fragmentation pattern of one weapon in that theatre. Yours. A denial is not a justification. Where an attacker answers civilian deaths by denying the attack rather than defending the target, it forecloses every defence the law makes available to it. The means were indiscriminate. The PrSM detonates fifteen to twenty metres above ground and disperses tens of thousands of tungsten fragments across a wide area. Investigators counted thousands of fragment impacts along a single 150-metre stretch of one residential street. The casualty pattern is not evidence of a strike gone wrong. It is evidence of the weapon working exactly as designed, in a place where its design guaranteed the result. And the strikes were successive. The first detonated above a sports hall where a girls' volleyball team was training. People ran into the open. The second fell on them. Then a third, then a fourth. Whatever might be argued about the first, nothing explains the rest except a decision taken with knowledge of what the first had just done. A city is not a proving ground. The PrSM had never been used in combat before that day. Lamerd was its debut, and Central Command's commander publicly praised that debut within days. It is sometimes assumed that validating a weapon under operational conditions is a military benefit that can be weighed in the balance. It cannot. The advantage the law requires must be "definite", "concrete and direct" — language chosen precisely to exclude benefits that are speculative, generalised or deferred. Performance data accrues to a production line, not to an attack. It belongs to no part of the balance a commander is permitted to strike. If the rationale was to observe the weapon's effects under live conditions, the civilians of Lamerd were not incidental to the object of the attack. They were the medium on which effectiveness was measured. The contract was made with knowledge. Complicity does not require sharing the perpetrator's purpose. It requires assistance having a substantial effect, furnished with knowledge. That is the standard on which the Hamburg court convicted the suppliers of Zyklon B in 1946; on which the Netherlands convicted Frans van Anraat for supplying chemical precursors to Iraq, holding expressly that the lawful commercial form of the transaction gave him no shelter; and which the French Cour de cassation confirmed reaches corporations in Lafarge. Your original contracts predate Lamerd. The expansion does not. By the time it was signed, the forensic record was public, the official account had collapsed twice, and CENTCOM had itself identified the operation as the weapon's combat debut. A prime contractor does not learn of its munition's first combat use from the newspapers. The expansion was not made in ignorance of how the weapon performed at Lamerd. It was made because of it. Your counsel will know that the corporation is not the principal exposure. Nuremberg did not try I.G. Farben or Krupp; it tried the men who ran them. Van Anraat went to prison as an individual. Officers who authorise continued manufacture and transfer after notice do so in their own names, in a world where Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Sweden and others exercise universal jurisdiction over grave breaches. That exposure does not lapse, and it travels. Accordingly: rescind the expansion agreement; suspend production and transfer pending an independent forensic investigation; preserve and disclose the performance data you hold on the Lamerd employment, because it is evidence; and cooperate with any prosecuting authority that opens a file. The answer that these are matters for the government and not the contractor was made at Nuremberg and failed there. A company that builds the weapon, receives the data on what it did to a city of thirty thousand, and then contracts to build four times as many is not a bystander to the decision. Do not repeat the claim that the matter is still under investigation. This is a government that tells its public it can read a name tag from orbit. It closed the Lamerd file in days, by denial, without answering a single question put to it. It has known since the morning of 28 February. It has decided the truth is inconvenient. Your corporation is now being asked whether it has decided the same. Avina Barzegar was two years old.