A Report from Mahabad
The morning of Monday, March 2nd marked the beginning of Israeli and American attacks, and the dropping of imperialist “precision” bombs on the city of Mahabad. Their first target was a “white building” (a safe house for intelligence officers) from which the sounds of prisoners being tortured had likely echoed into the surrounding homes for years. Now those same “peripheral” houses lie with shattered walls, their residents once again subjected to violence and fear. Following the strike on the Intelligence building, America and Israel dropped bombs on the Basij compound in the city centre, at a busy hour and location. After that, they blew up a police station in a peripheral district of the city, “Molla Khalil Square” a neighbourhood that had been the epicentre of the Jina uprising in Mahabad. During and after the uprising, the authorities arrested the youth of every household, and most of the martyrs of the Jina uprising in Mahabad also lived in these margins of the city. That police station had itself been a center of repression, hastily built overnight following the popular uprising in response to the brutal murder of Showana Mam-Qadri. The imperialist bombs destroyed that station, but they also killed or displaced the working-class and impoverished comrades of Showana, and the youth of Posht-Tap. The destitute street vendor selling cigarettes near that station, and the fruit seller beside him neither before the bombs nor during them was any plan of “liberation” from poverty and death being carried out on their behalf. After the bombs fell, their deaths became irreversible, and their working-class and impoverished comrades were no more destined to be “freed” from the grip of the bombs than from the grip of those who dropped them. The old man who used to rest his back against the wall on the “margins” of that police-station “point”, had he not broken his routine that day, would now have neither a back nor a wall to lean on.
The subsequent strikes by the imperialist front against Iran are often unclear to the city’s residents, becoming known only days later. Since the attacks on the city began, with every explosion, people call friends and relatives near whatever location they suspect was hit, asking after their safety and whether their guess was right.
On the morning of Friday, March 6th, around 8:15 a.m., a tremendous sound jolted awake those still asleep in Mahabad. Again, a massive column of smoke and dust rose from the city center into the sky. The central police station on Taleghani Street between Molla Jami and Ard Crossroad, wall-to-wall with the Mahabad Red Crescent building had been flattened; driven below ground level and reduced to rubble, made one with the earth beneath it. A conscript soldier had been left alone at the post. The officers and career staff had abandoned the station before the bombs fell, leaving that soldier, whose torn body was pulled from the rubble in the afternoon to the wails of his mother, using the hook of a loader crane to hold the door open for them. Within a two-hundred-meter “margin” of that “point,” not a single unbroken pane of glass could be found. The wall of the third-floor apartment behind that “point” had been hurled into the living room though a full alley separated that home from the “point” beneath which the conscript lay buried. Yet that soldier could not leave his post, and the residents of that home on the “margins” could not carry their house somewhere free of “points” and “margins.” The egg vendor passing by the “point” did not know that the bomb’s shockwave would hurl his poverty, his compulsion to provide for his family, so violently near that “point” into the “margin” that it would split him in two.
Every explosion, as we witnessed in Mahabad, has destroyed both the “point” and its “margins” together. We know that in every location struck so far, at least one conscript soldier has been killed; the surrounding homes have been destroyed; passersby have been killed or wounded.
People now see not only their homes but themselves as “targets,” and most of the city’s shops are shuttered. And yet, workers remain on the job. It is workers who clear the rubble from those very “points,” while the risk of a second strike on the same location holds no value for those who order the bombs, nor for those who govern the sites they destroy.
This labour alone is what is deemed “useful” and valuable by those in power, the same labour that these workers and the dispossessed, before the explosions, during them, and after them, are forced to sell in order to survive until death, whether by bomb or by work, and to keep their families alive. Work has not stopped anywhere in the city, in any workshop or workplace, except where owners and capitalists calculate that dismissing their workforce and pocketing the surplus of their labour is less advantageous than safeguarding their “capital” until the “liberation” promised in the wake of the capitalists’ bombs.
The city’s central bazaar remains closed, except for those on the “margins,” and for those who, at the very least to cover the rent on their homes and shops, or perhaps to honor checks still bouncing in the “center” at the hands of capitalists elsewhere in the country, have no choice but not to “stay home.”
Among the people whom the “points” have made homeless and from whom the “points” have taken lives, an anti-war consciousness and discourse has begun to take shape, one that has been growing since the very first day of the strikes. For others who have not yet tasted the “pinpoint strikes,” or who share no common ground with the people who have always lived on the “margins,” these deaths, displaced families and wounded bodies are still counted as the “casualties” of freedom. Casualties who for years have been ground down beneath the weight of suffering, labour, and exploitation so that others may live well.
10 March, 2026
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