We have written before of Makan Nasiri — the boy in the blue sweater, the seven-year-old taken from us at Shajareh Tayyebeh, whose body was never found and whose grave in Minab remains heartbreakingly empty. We promised then that we would never forget him. Now his mother, Asieh, has made certain the world cannot forget him either.
As the 2026 World Cup opens across the United States, Mexico and Canada, Asieh has broken her silence. On behalf of all the grieving mothers of Minab, she has written a letter to Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA — the man who speaks endlessly of peace through football, and who not long ago placed a so-called “peace prize” into the hands of US President Donald Trump. To him she puts a single, unanswerable question: which peace have you chosen?
For those who loved Makan, the cruelty of the timing is almost unbearable. Football was his whole world. Saturdays were his favourite day, because Saturdays meant football class. His mother remembers the morning of 28 February — how he dressed in his checkered school uniform, slipped on his cream sneakers, and tucked his blue sports pullover into his bag so he wouldn’t catch a cold after playing. He left for school happily. He never came home. In her culture, water is poured behind a traveller so that he returns safely. Her little boy set out on an ordinary morning and never returned.
She does not write in anger, she says, but as a mother whose son’s entire universe was a ball, a playground, and the simple dream of growing up. All that remains of him now, she writes, is one shoe, that blue pullover, and the echo of his laughter in the hearts of those who believed in peace. “Can you hear the laughter of my missing little boy too?” she asks the most powerful man in the game.
The mothers of Minab, she tells Infantino, now raise their children only in their dreams — picturing them grown, scoring goals for Iran, wearing the blue shirt adorned with doves of peace. “Can you see those birds of peace?” she asks. It is a question aimed straight at an institution that drapes itself in the language of unity while staying silent over the children buried beneath the rubble of an imposed war.
And she refuses to let that language be stolen from her. Infantino, she acknowledges, holds the power to decide who is honoured and who walks onto the world stage. But there are things his office cannot touch. “For me, peace means a child who stays alive and walks to a football field on his own feet,” she writes — and no trophy, no ceremony, no prize handed to a president can change what that word means to a mother with an empty grave.
Makan has not been forgotten on the pitch he loved. Before the tournament, the Iranian Embassy in the UK shared a short film in his memory, and his name was spoken among the fans during Iran’s match against New Zealand — the football-loving boy from Minab whose only earthly trace, after the bombing, was a single small shoe.
We remember him as we always have: not as a number in a death toll or a line in someone else’s politics, but as a child. A boy who laughed, who loved his team, who lived for Saturdays. His mother asked whether the powerful can hear the laughter of her missing son. We hear it. And we will keep his name, and her question, alive until they can no longer be ignored.
Makan Nasiri, the little martyr who loved football. We have not forgotten. We will not.
