Iran Today

The Shield and the Schoolyard

by Iran Prism 15 min read

The School

Kosar Girls’ Elementary School sits in Sardasht, a Kurdish border city in West Azerbaijan province that most Iranians know for one reason: in June 1987, Saddam Hussein’s air force dropped mustard gas on it, making Sardasht the first city in the world to be chemically attacked.1 The survivors carry the scars — respiratory damage, blindness, skin conditions that never healed. For nearly four decades, Sardasht’s identity has been a wound.

The school was built in that wound’s shadow. It served girls from families who had stayed through the chemical attacks, through the war, through everything that followed. It was small, unremarkable, and — to the girls who attended — as ordinary as a school should be.

In June 2025, during the twelve-day Israeli-American air campaign known as Operation Rising Lion, IRGC forces occupied Kosar Girls’ Elementary School.2 Soldiers moved into classrooms. Military equipment appeared where desks had been. Parents who came to retrieve belongings were turned away.

What was the IRGC doing inside a girls’ elementary school?

The question has a precise answer. And the answer connects Sardasht to Beirut, to Gaza, to southern Lebanon, to Yemen — and finally to a school near an IRGC facility in the port city of Minab, where on February 28, 2026, students died in a strike on a military target next door.

Twelve Schools, Nine Cities

Kosar was not an isolated incident. Between June 2025 and February 2026, at least twelve confirmed cases of IRGC forces occupying or militarizing civilian infrastructure were documented across nine Iranian cities. The pattern unfolded in three phases.3

June 2025 — The Twelve-Day War. When Israeli and American strikes targeted Iran’s military infrastructure, IRGC forces dispersed into civilian areas. In Kermanshah, the human rights organization Hengaw identified at least seven weapons sites in the Dizelabad and Dolatabad districts adjacent to Farabi Hospital.4 In Paveh, IRGC artillery was deployed near civilian communities in the Gzan Mountains. In Sardasht, soldiers occupied Kosar school.

January 2026 — The Crackdown. When nationwide protests erupted over the collapsing rial, the IRGC turned the same infrastructure against Iranian civilians. In Ilam, Rababeh Kamali School — directly across the street from Imam Khomeini Hospital — was commandeered as a staging area while IRGC forces besieged the hospital for over twenty-four hours, firing into the courtyard, deploying tear gas inside wards, and beating medical staff.5 In Arak and Sari, schools became detention centers. In Tehran, Rasht, Gorgan, and Shiraz, security forces swarmed hospitals — monitoring care, blocking resuscitation, seizing wounded protesters, removing bodies in black bags. Six Tehran hospitals recorded 217 deaths on January 8 alone.6

February 2026 — Pre-Strike Dispersal. As tensions escalated again, Iran International reported IRGC commanders holding non-military meetings inside Khatam al-Anbia Hospital in Tehran, accompanied by security details.7 Forces gathered in sports stadiums and arenas. And in Minab, a school sat adjacent to an IRGC facility that would be struck on February 28.

These are not allegations from a single source. The hospital incidents were verified by AP and the digital forensics organization Mnemonic, corroborated by the U.S. State Department, documented in The Lancet, and confirmed by WHO’s Director-General, who publicly demanded the release of detained doctors.8 The school occupations were documented by Hengaw and Iran Human Rights, organizations with established field methodologies.

Twelve incidents in nine cities across three distinct phases — military operations, domestic crackdown, and pre-strike dispersal. The same pattern, adapted to every circumstance. That kind of consistency does not happen by accident.

Where the Playbook Was Written

The IRGC did not invent this strategy in 2025. It refined it over four decades across four countries, then brought it home.

The story begins in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in 1982, when approximately 800 IRGC advisors arrived to build an organization that would become Hezbollah.9 Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem later confirmed that every member attended IRGC-supervised training. What the IRGC created in Lebanon was not just a militia — it was a laboratory.

By 2006, when Israel and Hezbollah fought a thirty-four-day war, Human Rights Watch documented weapons stored in civilian homes, beside mosques, and inside apartment buildings in the Dahieh suburb of southern Beirut.10 The arsenal was then roughly 15,000 rockets. By 2024, it had grown to an estimated 150,000, with the Alma Research Center identifying twenty-eight missile sites within Beirut alone. The IDF assessed that one-quarter to one-third of buildings in most southern Lebanese villages served Hezbollah’s military apparatus.11

Then came Hamas. IRGC and Hezbollah hosted Hamas deportees in Lebanon from 1992, teaching bomb construction and guerrilla tactics. IRGC Aerospace Force commander Hajizadeh stated publicly in 2021: “All the missiles you might see in Gaza and Lebanon were created with Iran’s support.”12 The tactics evolved from surface embedding to subterranean — tunnel networks beneath UNRWA schools, rockets found in UN facilities on at least three occasions in 2014, and at al-Shifa Hospital, a tunnel shaft descending ten meters with a spiral staircase, leading to a tunnel extending over 213 meters beneath the surgery center.13

Then the Houthis. UN Panel of Experts documented Houthi militarization of schools using satellite imagery — al-Wehdah and Ahmed Fareg schools among them — with explosives planted “in and around schools, mosques, and houses.” The panel attributed the Houthis’ military transformation to “transfer of materiel and the assistance and training provided by IRGC-QF, Hezbollah, and Iraqi specialists.”14

Then Iraqi militias. CSIS documented 10,000 Quds Force-led militia forces in the Mosul battlespace, with the PMF occupying schools, operating secret prisons, and embedding as permanent armed presence in civilian neighborhoods.15

The same pattern, across four theaters, over four decades. Not top-down instruction from a manual — no publicly available IRGC document explicitly teaches “use civilian infrastructure as shields.” Instead, what researchers describe as a co-evolutionary model: Hezbollah developed tactics in Lebanon’s geography, the IRGC refined and standardized them through its “Mosaic Doctrine” of dispersed asymmetric warfare, then transmitted them through each new proxy.16

Three commanders bridge these theaters to the domestic crackdown. Major General Mohammad Pakpour led IRGC ground operations in Syria, was appointed Commander-in-Chief on June 13, 2025, and deployed Ground Forces to Kermanshah during the January 2026 protests.17 Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi built Iran’s entire proxy infrastructure as the first Quds Force commander, mentored Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh, and was appointed IRGC Deputy Commander-in-Chief on December 31, 2025 specifically to manage the uprising — a man wanted by INTERPOL for the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires.18 Brigadier General Mohammad Karami replaced Pakpour as Ground Forces commander after previously governing Sistan-Baluchestan province, where security forces massacred at least 105 civilians on “Bloody Friday” in September 2022.19

The commanders who built the proxy network are the same commanders who turned it inward. The FDD described Vahidi’s appointment as demonstrating “how the same system that brutalizes Iranians also targets Americans and Israelis.”20

Why They Do It

The strategic logic is worth examining — because what the IRGC is doing is not desperate improvisation. It is calculated positioning that serves five distinct functions simultaneously.21

First, deterrence. Embedding military assets inside hospitals and schools raises the political and legal cost of any strike against them. When the February 2026 dispersal into hospitals and stadiums occurred, it was not because the IRGC lacked other facilities — it maintains extensive underground bunker networks and hardened command centers. For Khatam al-Anbia Hospital, military analysts found no legitimate military necessity for holding command meetings inside a medical facility.22 The hospital’s value was not operational. It was protective.

Second, propaganda. When protected sites are struck and civilians die, the deaths generate international condemnation of the attacker. The Minab school strike — a military target adjacent to a school — produced exactly this dynamic. The regime that created the proximity claimed the victimhood.

Third, domestic control. IRGC presence in hospitals intimidates medical staff into compliance. During the January crackdown, doctors hid wounded protesters by recording gunshot wounds as “abdominal pain” and fractures as “falling accidents.”23 One Tehran surgeon operated a clandestine trauma ward in a converted cosmetic clinic for four days, treating over ninety patients without anesthesia because hospitals were too dangerous.24 The medicalization of repression — controlling who receives treatment and who does not — is not a side effect of hospital occupation. It is the purpose.

Fourth, evidence destruction. Bodies removed in black bags deny families documentation of cause of death. The detention of seventy-nine healthcare professionals, including one surgeon charged with moharebeh — “war against God,” carrying the death penalty — for merely stating willingness to treat wounded civilians, signals that medical evidence of state violence is itself a crime.25

Fifth, hostage logic. Wounded protesters inside IRGC-controlled hospitals become instruments of intelligence extraction. The practice’s terminal point was confirmed on February 19, 2026, by an unlikely source: Javad Tajik, head of Tehran’s Behesht Zahra cemetery organization, publicly acknowledged the “coup de grace” — the practice of delivering fatal shots to wounded protesters during the January crackdown.26 Patients were found dead on treatment beds, still connected to machines, with fresh bullet wounds in their heads.

Consider what it means for a parent to send a child to school knowing that the building could, at any moment, become a military position — and that there is no alternative, no private school option, no moving to a safer district. The school is the only school. The regime is the only regime.

Five functions from one tactic. Deterrence, propaganda, control, destruction of evidence, and hostage-taking. The children near the military facility are not an unfortunate coincidence. They are the strategy’s load-bearing element.

In Islamic jurisprudence, the hospital is inviolable — the bimaristan tradition of sanctuary for the sick predates the Geneva Conventions by centuries. The IRGC does not merely violate international law when it turns a hospital into an execution site. It desecrates the very religious tradition it claims to defend.

What the Law Actually Says

A predictable response to legal analysis like this is to call it “war propaganda designed to justify civilian deaths.” That framing is worth examining — because it assumes that identifying who created the danger is the same as excusing the destruction. It is not.27

The legal framework is explicit.

Additional Protocol I, Article 51(7) — which Iran ratified — prohibits using civilian presence to render areas immune from military operations. This covers both active shielding (forcing civilians toward targets) and passive shielding (exploiting existing civilian proximity).28

Article 58 imposes affirmative obligations on the defending party: to the maximum extent feasible, remove civilians from the vicinity of military objectives, and avoid locating military objectives within densely populated areas. The IRGC does the opposite.29

Article 12(4) states that “under no circumstances” may medical units be used in an attempt to shield military objectives from attack. The phrase “under no circumstances” permits no exception — not wartime emergency, not operational necessity, not any justification the regime might construct.30

The ICC’s Rome Statute codifies human shielding as a standalone war crime under Article 8(2)(b)(xxiii) — “utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations.”31

And the ICTY’s ruling in Prosecutor v. Blaškić established that using civilians as human shields constitutes a criminal violation “regardless of whether those human shields were actually attacked or harmed.”32 The crime is the act of placing them at risk — not the outcome.

Here is what this means for responsibility: when one party deliberately places military assets next to a school, and the other party strikes that military target, both parties have legal obligations. The attacker must take every feasible precaution — choose weapons that minimize blast radius, adjust timing for lower civilian presence, issue warnings, and cancel the attack if civilian harm appears excessive.33 But the party that created the proximity — the party that chose to locate military objectives next to children — bears the foundational legal responsibility for the danger those children were placed in.

The scholarly consensus on this point is clear. As Michael Schmitt of the Lieber Institute at West Point argues, any interpretation that reduces attacker liability for strikes on shielded targets “allows a malevolent enemy engaged in a war crime to deprive the very individuals IHL is meant to protect of some of the protection they enjoy as civilians.”34 The solution is not to blame one side or the other. It is to hold both simultaneously accountable — and to recognize that the party using shields creates the conditions that kill.

Iran ratified the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I. These obligations are directly binding. The IRGC’s systematic militarization of hospitals and schools is not a gray area. It is a documented violation of treaties Iran signed.

The Schoolyard

In Sardasht, the IRGC eventually left Kosar Girls’ Elementary School. The soldiers moved on. The desks, presumably, returned to their places.

But the doctrine remains. The commanders who refined it across four countries and four decades are still in command — or have been replaced by officers trained in the same system. The Mosaic Doctrine still disperses military assets into civilian spaces. The proxy playbook still treats Geneva Convention protections as tactical advantages rather than obligations.

The question is straightforward. What happens to the next school that sits near the next IRGC facility?

If the world looks at the wreckage and blames only the party that fired — without asking who placed children next to a military target — then the strategy works. Every commander watching learns the lesson: embed deeper, build closer, ensure the cameras find the smallest bodies first. The cost of future strikes rises. The cost of future shielding drops to zero.

If the world recognizes what the evidence documents — a four-decade strategy of deliberate civilian endangerment, refined across Beirut and Gaza and Sanaa and Mosul and now deployed against Iran’s own people — then the calculus changes. Commanders face personal liability. The strategy becomes self-defeating rather than self-reinforcing.

The girls of Kosar Elementary did not choose to attend school next to an IRGC position. The patients of Imam Khomeini Hospital did not choose to be wounded in an IRGC-controlled facility. The students in Minab did not choose to study next to a military target.

Someone chose for them. The evidence says who.35

For the proxy pipeline that brought this doctrine home, see From Beirut to Minab. For the forensic evidence, see Twelve Incidents, Nine Cities. For the legal framework, see The Law Is Clear.

Footnotes

  1. Sardasht was attacked with chemical weapons on June 28, 1987. The attack killed 130 and injured over 8,000. Iran filed a case at the International Court of Justice. The city’s chemical weapons memorial museum documents the attack. ↩

  2. Hengaw Human Rights Organization, field documentation, June 2025. Hengaw maintains a network of field correspondents across Kurdish regions of Iran. ↩

  3. The twelve-incident documentation draws on reporting from Hengaw, Iran Human Rights (IHR), AP, Mnemonic digital forensics, Iran International, and the U.S. State Department. ↩

  4. Hengaw identified at least seven weapons sites in the Dizelabad and Dolatabad districts of Kermanshah adjacent to Farabi Hospital. Israeli forces struck several of these sites during Operation Rising Lion. ↩

  5. AP and Mnemonic verified video showing IRGC forces firing into Imam Khomeini Hospital courtyard in Ilam, deploying tear gas inside wards, and beating medical staff. The U.S. State Department described the hospital assault as “a clear crime against humanity.” ↩

  6. AP investigation published February 27, 2026, based on nine doctor interviews and verification of twelve-plus videos with Mnemonic. Documented security agents monitoring care, blocking resuscitation, seizing wounded, and removing bodies in black bags across hospitals in Tehran, Rasht, Gorgan, Shiraz, and Ilam. ↩

  7. Iran International, anonymous source report, February 2026. Consistent with satellite-confirmed dispersal patterns. ↩

  8. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus publicly confirmed the arrest of doctors and demanded their release. The Lancet published correspondence documenting the breach of medical neutrality in Iran. ↩

  9. Naim Qassem, Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General, confirmed all members attended IRGC-supervised training in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. ↩

  10. Human Rights Watch documented weapons stored in civilian homes, beside mosques, and inside apartment buildings during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. HRW characterized these violations as present but “not widespread” in 2006. ↩

  11. Alma Research and Education Center identified twenty-eight Hezbollah missile sites within Beirut. IDF assessments estimated one-quarter to one-third of buildings in most southern Lebanese Shia villages served Hezbollah’s military apparatus by 2024. ↩

  12. IRGC Aerospace Force commander Hajizadeh, public statement, 2021. Approximately 500 Hamas and PIJ militants received specialized combat training in Iran under Quds Force officers, per Wall Street Journal reporting, September 2023. ↩

  13. New York Times verification of tunnel at al-Shifa Hospital extending at least 213 meters beneath the surgery center, containing bunkers, living areas, and a communications room. CCTV footage showed Hamas fighters leading hostages into the hospital on October 7, 2023. ↩

  14. UN Panel of Experts on Yemen, documented with satellite imagery. Al-Wehdah and Ahmed Fareg schools among confirmed militarized sites. ↩

  15. Center for Strategic and International Studies documentation of Quds Force-led militia forces in the Mosul battlespace. ↩

  16. The co-evolutionary model describes shared tactical development across IRGC and its proxies — not formal doctrine transfer from a single manual, but iterative refinement through the “Mosaic Doctrine” framework of dispersed asymmetric warfare. ↩

  17. CTP-ISW characterized Pakpour’s deployment of Ground Forces to Kermanshah as indicating “the regime views the protests as an insurgency.” Pakpour was reportedly killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026. ↩

  18. Ahmad Vahidi served as the first commander of the Quds Force (1988-1998), building Iran’s proxy infrastructure. INTERPOL issued a Red Notice for his role in the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. FDD described his December 2025 appointment as demonstrating the continuity between external and internal repression. ↩

  19. Iran Human Rights documentation of the September 30, 2022 massacre in Zahedan. Karami has been sanctioned by multiple governments for human rights violations. ↩

  20. Foundation for Defense of Democracies analysis of Vahidi’s appointment, December 2025. ↩

  21. The five-function framework synthesizes analysis from multiple sources documenting the strategic logic of civilian infrastructure militarization. ↩

  22. Military necessity assessment: IRGC maintains extensive underground bunker networks, hardened command centers, and dispersed military installations. Command meetings can occur in any secure facility. No legitimate military necessity exists for holding them inside a hospital. ↩

  23. Doctors’ self-censorship documented by AP and Mnemonic. Medical professionals recorded gunshot wounds using alternative diagnoses to avoid IRGC scrutiny. ↩

  24. The clandestine trauma ward operated for four days in a converted cosmetic clinic in Tehran. The surgeon treated over ninety patients without anesthesia. Source: AP investigation, February 2026. ↩

  25. Iran Human Rights documented the detention of seventy-nine healthcare professionals since January 9, 2026, including twelve medical students. One surgeon was charged with moharebeh for stating willingness to treat wounded civilians. ↩

  26. Javad Tajik, head of Tehran’s Behesht Zahra cemetery organization, publicly confirmed the coup de grace practice on February 19, 2026. This constitutes a regime official’s own admission of extrajudicial execution of wounded civilians. ↩

  27. Inoculation: the phrase “war propaganda” is the regime’s standard response to documentation of its military use of civilian infrastructure. Readers should evaluate the evidence independently. ↩

  28. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, Article 51(7). Iran ratified AP I. The prohibition covers both active shielding (directing civilians) and exploitation of existing civilian proximity. ↩

  29. AP I, Article 58, imposes affirmative obligations on the defending party to remove civilians from military objective proximity and avoid locating military objectives in populated areas. ↩

  30. AP I, Article 12(4): “Under no circumstances shall medical units be used in an attempt to shield military objectives from attack.” The ICRC’s 2025 analysis confirms protection can only be lost “in the rarest and most exceptional circumstances.” ↩

  31. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 8(2)(b)(xxiii). Iran signed but never ratified the Rome Statute. However, ICRC Customary IHL Rule 97 extends the prohibition to all conflicts regardless of treaty status. ↩

  32. ICTY, Prosecutor v. Blaškić (IT-95-14), Trial Chamber judgment. The crime is the exposure to risk, not the harm itself. ↩

  33. AP I, Article 57, precautionary obligations. The Commission of Inquiry on Lebanon confirmed that issuing a warning does not discharge the obligation to continue taking precautionary measures toward civilians who remain. ↩

  34. Michael Schmitt, Lieber Institute at West Point, on relaxation of proportionality standards for involuntary human shields. Schmitt objects both on practical grounds (“begs the question, ‘relaxed how and how much?’”) and principled ones. ↩

  35. The Iranian Archive (Atlantic Council and Mnemonic) has forensically preserved over two million digital artifacts using chain-of-custody best practices. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran has collected over 38,000 evidence items and conducted approximately 300 in-depth interviews. The evidence is being preserved. ↩