Eleven-year-old Elham had surprised everyone in her family and at school with her volleyball skills. She had only been on the team for two years, but already hit a mean serve.

Her father told Iran-based reporter Negin Bagheri that Elham had big dreams — to become a professional volleyball player one day.

But on the same day that a strike killed about 200 students and teachers at a girls’ school in the city of Minab on the first day of the US-Israeli war with Iran, Elham was killed in another attack that’s gotten less media attention.

On Feb. 28, a separate attack struck the small city of Lamerd, near Shiraz in the south of the country. There, members of a teenage volleyball team were practicing at a sports hall. Two younger children, 11-year-old Elham and 10-year-old Helma, were also killed. Altogether, about 21 people were killed on that day, including a young boy who was practicing soccer in a nearby field.

The US military is still investigating the Minab school strike, for which evidence suggests the United States was responsible. But an official at the Department of Defense has confirmed to The World that it’s also investigating the incident in Lamerd.

What’s hauntingly similar about both attacks is that there appears to have been military targets nearby, although both civilian areas were completely separate and away from the intended targets. The US military technically has a set of rules and guidelines that it needs to follow prior to every strike to make sure it minimizes the level of civilian deaths and casualties. 

But Wes J. Bryant, an Air Force combat veteran, told The World that these guidelines don’t seem to be a priority in this war.

“There should be zero tolerance for civilian casualties in a case like this,” Bryant said, “and the fact that we are seeing so many is very horrifying.”

Meanwhile, an internet blackout imposed by the Iranian government has also made it difficult to obtain accurate, timely information on the ground.

Ten-year-old Helma’s father was too broken to speak. “I can’t cope with the death of my daughter,” he told reporter Bagheri.

She connected, instead, with Helma’s cousin and her coach, who was at the sports hall, and sustained serious injuries to the neck and head.

The strike happened around 5:00 p.m., when it was getting dark outside. The first bomb hit what seems to be a military base, according to witnesses. But the second one exploded mid-air.

A verified video of the attack published by the BBC’s Persian news service, shows the moment of the explosion. The witnesses say that shrapnel from that missile pierced through the roof of the sports complex.

The power went out, the children were scared and screaming and everyone scrambled to find their way out of the gym, Bagheri said. Amid the chaos, Helma ran up to her coach and complained about something burning in her chest.

She lifted up her shirt, she said, and you could see something small had pierced through her body. A few minutes later she fainted, and never woke up.

Iran’s state media published videos and images from the aftermath of the strike. The roof of the sports hall is now gone. The right side of the yellow brick building is blackened from the fire. An official described the scene of the attack, breaking down in tears.

There were at least three strikes on that day in Lamerd. Two hit near the sports hall, another in a residential area, according to witnesses and local officials.

Many of those who were killed, Bagheri reported, were at home. One was a day laborer from Afghanistan. Another, a pedestrian who was heading to a nearby pharmacy.

Asked about the Lamerd attack, an official at the Department of Defense wrote in an email to The World that “it would be inappropriate to comment, as this is under investigation.”

But, Bryant, who served 20 years in the US Air Force, said that in 2014, he was in charge of coordinating some of the first US airstrikes against ISIS in Baghdad, Iraq.

“The amount of targets that were hit even in the first few days of this war surpasses the first six months of the counter ISIS campaign,” he explained, “I can tell you we could barely keep up with the amount of strikes we were conducting then. And so, the fact that we’ve hit more targets in the first few days than in the first six months of that campaign to me is just horrifying.”

Bryant served as a senior advisor for a new program at the Pentagon called the “Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.” The program was set up to minimize civilian casualties. But it was disbanded in 2021, dissolved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, ​​as part of a broader Pentagon reorganization.

“Were the [Civilian Protection Center of Excellence] still in place, and were the personnel that were spread across the force, and was our momentum still in place toward where we were going with the efforts we were doing, this strike would not have happened, and the Iran campaign would look a lot different,” he said, referring to the Minab school attack.

Despite the challenges of obtaining news from inside the country, Iran’s Red Crescent Society posts daily videos showing rescuers pulling people from under the rubble.

The news of the Lamerd sports hall didn’t get as much attention, reporter Bagheri said, because it was overshadowed by the horrific school attack in Minab.

But, put together, she said, these two incidents show how, in just one day, and in the span of a few hours, the US likely killed so many civilians.

The US hasn’t officially taken responsibility for any of the attacks.