Investigation into missile strike on Iranian girls’ school won’t cover up the truth, US general insists
A US general said yesterday that the US investigation into the missile attack on a girls’ school in Iran will not cover up the truth.
But General David Petraeus, former CIA director and commander of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, added that the investigation “should have happened sooner.”
At least 168 people, mostly female students, were killed in a Tomahawk missile attack on Minab in southern Iran on the first day of the conflict.
If the Pentagon confirms responsibility, it would be one of the worst civilian casualties in decades of U.S. military conflicts in the Middle East. But General Petraeus told Radio 4’s Today program yesterday that his own rules required the army to be ‘the first to tell the truth’.
He believed the Trump administration still respected those rules.
‘We want to make headlines by defeating the bad guys,’ he said. ‘We want to make headlines rather than respond, but then we want to deal with the facts as we understand them.
‘We then provide updates but will not pivot. We won’t put lipstick on pigs. We’re just going to put it out there.’
He said US Central Command had appointed a ‘general officer from outside the command’ to investigate the girls’ deaths.
General David Petraeus (photo taken in 2010) says investigation into missile attack on girls’ school in Iran ‘should have happened sooner’
A still image in the video shows smoke billowing after a US Tomahawk missile struck near the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Iran, on February 28, 2026
General Petraeus added: ‘This was a building that was part of the Iranian naval base but has been walled off in recent years and has a playground etc. There was, and that might have been an indication that it wasn’t. [a target].
‘But I’m pretty sure that when a general investigates this, the results will represent integrity.
‘I hope it will be made public with an explanation along the lines of: ‘What happened, why did it happen, and what are we doing in the future to reduce the chances of this happening again?’
He said he was involved in a “big mistake” during NATO’s 1999 bombing of the former Yugoslavia when “we deployed three cruise missiles at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.”
He said this was because an officer responsible for checking targets was not in Stuttgart, Germany, that day.
‘These things happen,’ he added. ‘Tell the truth as you understand it and try to explain how it happened.’
