There was no one in the room at all, no one except the stillness that had taken up the space, that had settled on it like a jackhammer. In the middle of the mourners who were at the funeral linked to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s family, one was not attracted by the dignitaries nor by the usual paraphernalia of state’s mourning, but by something that is almost inconceivable. A tiny coffin. At that fleeting moment, caught by the cameras and sent to a world, weary of war, that was already alive with the latest modern world, geopolitics faded away. The image transcended its geography and captured the world’s consciousness not because the child was there, but because of the object. The lightest coffins are not necessarily the lightest in weight, it’s the ones that carry futures that never had a chance to unfold. That picture is sad and is not the property of any nation, regime or side of a line. It is part of the history books of all wars fought by mankind.
There is a universal syntax to grief, a syntax that is not translatable and doesn’t respect borders. The sorrow of a bomb falling or a shell ripping through a neighbourhood is not identified by nationality or creed. In Sana’a, mothers cry with the same “shuddering breath” as they do in Kiev, fathers lower their children into the earth with the same “broken posture” in a village in Gaza, as in a town in the Punjab. Ideologies change, treaties expire and the names of leaders are forgotten or forgotten in the margins of history textbooks. Yet the heart-wrenching plight of man is timeless. The political structure of the conflict melts away when we peer through the lens of the camera and observe the parent with a small, covered-up figure.
A chronicle of this singular failure unfolds over the modern era relentlessly. In the total mobilization of World War II, fire rained on cities up and down Europe, leaving empty desks in classrooms from London to Dresden. The morning chores of thousands of school children were destroyed in an instant when the atomic flash over Hiroshima and Nagasaki months later turned their world upside down. So it was left for centuries, and the script changed not a bit. The Syrian war made ancient towns rustling bones playgrounds of concrete, where childhoods were suffocated by dust, chemical fumes. A whole generation of Yemenis was squandered to become hollow-eyed ghosts, before ever learning to read, because of a blockade and a bombardment. Today more often than not, missiles have torn through the fields of Ukraine, destroying nurseries, and making everyday winter mornings a struggle for life. History repeats itself because we fail to see the empty cradles in the wake of every advancing army, and we measure progress by military doctrine.
Perhaps no place is more emblematic of this modern tragedy than Gaza, which has been the ultimate symbol of modern civilian suffering. The very infrastructure of childhood has been systematically undone, beneath the weight of collapsed concrete and the dust of pulverized high-rises. Hospitals, meant to be sanctuaries of life, become overcrowded settings of triage and of the last farewells. The pictures coming out of these streets strewn with rubble show no partisan spin; they show children being pulled from the rubble, eyes wide with a terror no young mind should be able to hold, faces masked in gray ash. Each one of these images poses a deceptively simple yet haunting question that no military strategist can find a clean answer to: what was the crime of the child? War becomes a reality in a neighbourhood and the distinction between combatant and bystander disappears, and the price of war is paid in human lives.
This very sad reality spreads worldwide, including the highly volatile region of South Asia. In May of 2025, India also attacked civilians and children in the midst of the mayhem and bloodshed of the India-Pakistan military standoff. It was just and proper that Pakistan retaliated. The shock in the border villages where artillery was dropping was felt in the fear of children shaking in makeshift shelters and the abrupt and violent halt of civilian life. For those whose youth had been laid to rest on the Line of Occupation, neither the geopolitical arguments nor the sobs of those who had fled to the other side could bring any comfort, the only comfort that could come was the deep weight of war.
War-making is a very sad business. Kids don’t vote to approve a war. They do not sit in dimly lit war rooms, drawing up their doctrine of preemptive strikes, or debating over historical grievances or negotiating the exact location of a border. They don’t sign the contracts of missiles that plow through the night. But, in what is an ugly thing to come out of the human heart, they are always the last to get hurt. They have their birthdays, their years at school, their parents and their sense of security taken away from them. They must pay for the pride of nations with the currency of their own unlived years: they must inherit a world split in two by decisions made by grownups.
Maybe it’s high time to redefine the grandeur of the empire, the state or the nation by the territories they take, the resources they procure or the sophistication of the arms which they have collected. Rather, it is important to start to account for the real price of war in terms of the physical dimensions of the coffins that follow. If a society becomes comfortable with burying its future, then it has already lost their moral compass. Heavy is the burden of the tiny wooden box that is carried through the streets of a grieving city, a grim statement of the human folly of limits. The smallest coffins are the heaviest burdens we bear, for they hold the absolute greatest loss a civilization can suffer – a tomorrow that will never come.
