“They brought me a school notebook.”
Haj Mahmoud Karimi, one of Iran’s best-known reciters of the Ahl al-Bayt, held up a small booklet before a packed mourning hall. Its cover was scorched, its pages warped and stained, its edges blackened by fire.
“It belongs to an eleven-year-old girl named Nazanin Zahra Saqeb. She was killed in the bombardments and attained martyrdom. This notebook was recovered from beneath the rubble.”
Then he opened it and began to read — not a sermon, not a poem, but a child’s homework.
“Look at the lessons she was working on: isosceles triangle, parallelogram, rhombus, trapezoid… She was doing her homework. She was only eleven.”
The war that came for the children
Nazanin Zahra Saqeb Bakhshayesh was a fifth-grade pupil from the town of Vaein in Shahriar, west of Tehran. Her short life ended in the war Iranians call the Ramadan War — the US–Israeli assault that opened on 28 February 2026 (9 Esfand 1404).
That first morning, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was assassinated in the strike on his compound in Tehran. Hours later, American Tomahawk missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, in the southern province of Hormozgan — then struck again as families and rescuers dug through the rubble. At least 156 people were killed, among them 120 schoolchildren and 26 teachers. It was the deadliest American attack on civilians this century, and a UN fact-finding mission has since found reasonable grounds to believe war crimes were committed.
The children of Minab became the grief of the whole nation. They also became, in the heart of one eleven-year-old girl in Shahriar, a longing.
Weeks into the war, a missile struck Nazanin Zahra’s family home in Vaein. Eleven members of three related families — a grandfather, mothers, and their young children — were martyred together beneath one roof. Nazanin Zahra and her brothers were among them. They were carried through the streets of Shahriar on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq (AS) and laid to rest at the city’s Imamzadeh Ismail.
From the ruins of that house, someone pulled out a burned school notebook.
The will in the margins
What Karimi read from those pages silenced the hall.
Right after the geometry exercises — the angles and triangles of a fifth-grade workbook — she had written: “In the name of God… the Leader was martyred, leaving us all alone.”
It was two days after the Leader’s martyrdom. “Look at the maturity of a girl in this grade!” Karimi said.
Then she paused. Hesitated. Scribbled out a few lines, wondering what to write:
“I want to write my will too, though I know I am not worthy of martyrdom. So I write this for myself. It is not for wealth or worldly things that I write this will. I am in love with martyrdom, yet I feel so unworthy. One by one, all the purest souls are attaining martyrdom, and I am left behind.”
At one point the ink had run — water or rain had spilled on the page, Karimi noted, smudging the words. He did not say what else may have fallen there.
“It breaks my heart that all of them were worthy, while I never was, nor am I now.”
“I will never let this chador fall”
She was, by every account, a devoted student. She was memorising the Holy Quran. She was learning English. She attended school. “I am in fifth grade,” she wrote, as if the ordinary sentence mattered.
“Yet when I see the martyred children of the Minab school, a deep longing fills my heart.”
During the airstrikes, Karimi recounted, she would gather her younger brothers at home and recite the Quran to them until they fell asleep. Eleven years old, soothing children through the sound of missiles with the words of God.
“I will never let this chador fall… And I fear no one in this world except God.”
“O Imam of our Time, hasten your return!”
She signed it: “Nazanin Zahra Saqeb. I cherish my name, Zahra, with all my heart.”
Then she wrote: “To be continued…” — and drew a little heart.
“And that was the end of her writing,” Karimi said.
Elsewhere in the burned notebook, Iranian media have published another page in her neat hand — a couplet for one of the war’s martyred commanders: “Live like a martyr, so that you die a martyr; be a follower of Imam Reza, and you will be honoured.” She had been rehearsing her own ending for a long time.
“You, Mahmoud Karimi, take a lesson”
Karimi did not let the notebook indict only the enemy. He told the hall of a prominent public figure he had once confronted: Why don’t you speak out about the martyrs of Minab? Don’t even call them martyrs — call them innocent victims, our fellow countrymen, the children. Why don’t you speak of Makan Nasiri, the little one still missing beneath the school’s rubble?
The man replied: “If I speak out, what if people curse me?!”
“You cannot go through your entire life expecting everyone to like you,” Karimi answered. “Eventually, the enemies of God ought to detest you. Those who hold a platform should take a lesson.”
Then he turned the rebuke on himself, by name: “You, Mahmoud Karimi, take a lesson from this too!”
The fruit of the martyrs’ blood
“How deeply indebted we are to these martyrs,” he said, holding the notebook to his face. That a nation sits together in mourning, stands resolute before the world, and commands respect across the globe — while those who sought to strangle and starve it watch their own calculations collapse — “this is the sacred fruit of the martyrs’ blood.”
He closed with the words of the martyred Leader himself: “Keeping the memory of the martyrs alive is no less than martyrdom itself.”
Nazanin Zahra ended her will with “to be continued” and a small drawn heart. She was eleven. The continuation is not hers to write anymore. It is ours.
A story drawn from real life...
This is the story of Nazanin Zahra Sagheb.
A little girl. The daughter of an IRGC missile commander.
The daughter of an IRGC missile commander, she was killed in a US attack alongside her mother, her two brothers, and other family members.
All that remained of them was her mother’s bracelet and Nazanin Zahra’s school notebook.
These last precious belongings were entrusted to Iran’s Aerospace Force.
They took so much from us. But they could never take away our resolve.
Our path continues. Our homeland is worth everything. And we will give everything to protect it.
