Forty-six senators — 44 Democrats plus independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King — wrote to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday demanding a public investigation into the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab. Between 165 and 180 people were killed, mostly primary school girls, along with teachers and parents.
The letter quoted Hegseth's own words back to him: his 2 March statement that US forces operate under "no stupid rules of engagement." Three independent investigations — by The Washington Post, CNN, and CBC — had already concluded from crater geometry, fragment analysis, and geolocated debris that the strike was a US weapon fired at a misidentified target. The senators' letter arrived two weeks after those findings were published, and days after the Massie-Khanna War Powers Resolution failed by seven votes in the same Congress.
Forty-six senators is not a majority. It is not enough to compel disclosure under any existing mechanism. The same chamber that declined to assert its constitutional authority over the war's legality is now asking the executive branch to investigate itself. A letter is political pressure; it is not a subpoena. The investigation remains classified and preliminary. Neither findings nor accountability measures have been made public. The administration controls both the timeline and the classification level — and 46 signatures, without a Republican among them, do not change that arithmetic.
The historical pattern is instructive. Congressional inquiries into wartime targeting failures — from the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade to the 2015 Kunduz hospital strike — have consistently produced findings only after the political pressure that initiated them dissipated. The Pentagon's inspector general took 18 months to investigate the 2019 Baghuz strike that killed dozens of Syrian civilians. The question is whether Minab — where thousands gathered for a mass funeral in the town's central square — generates sustained domestic political cost sufficient to compress that timeline.
