They Took More Than a Million Years of Life and Love from Iran!
S. Rouzbeh
2026-08-31

Taking an approximate figure of 40,000 deaths as a working assumption, this article considers the human future lost—not only the lives cut short, but also the families, relationships, experience and hopes that are wounded or disappear with them.

If we reduce forty thousand deaths to a single number, how much of the catastrophe do we fail to see?

When a person is killed, is it only one life that is lost, or are a family, love, experience and part of a country’s future also wounded and destroyed?

In this article, I will not enter the long-running dispute over the precise number of those killed. For the calculation, I will take an approximate figure of forty thousand people as an assumption—a number between published estimates. The Toronto-based International Centre for Human Rights has spoken of at least 43,000 people killed; Iran International, on the basis of documents it says it has examined, has reported more than 36,500 deaths; and Donald Trump, too, put the figure at 54,000 in Tir. These figures do not yet allow a final judgement; perhaps the number is even higher. But to understand the human scale of the catastrophe, I will use forty thousand as my working assumption.

Let me say from the outset that the purpose of this calculation is not to put a price on the lives of those killed. A human life has no price. But I had to explain the scale of the killing: the point is to understand exactly what is taken from a country when a human being is killed.

When we talk about infrastructure, most people think of roads, bridges, power stations, refineries, hospitals, or water and electricity networks. If a bridge is destroyed, we talk about the cost and the years it will take to rebuild it. But the most important infrastructure of any country is its people and human resources: people whose families, schools, communities and they themselves have invested years in their growth and experience.

A skilled worker, mechanic, driver, electrician, welder, nurse, teacher, farmer, shopkeeper, artist, writer, technician, doctor, engineer, researcher or business owner does not come into being in a day. Each is the result of years of education, work, experience and learning. Even a young person who is still a student or has not yet found a job has a future in which their abilities have not yet had the chance to emerge.

If we assume that each of the forty thousand people killed could, on average, have lived, worked, loved, learned, raised children and taken part in society for just another thirty to forty years, then around 1.2 million to 1.6 million years of Iran’s human future have been erased.

This is not an economic figure; it is a figure of lives.

Those million years did not contain only working hours. There were weddings that will no longer take place. There were children who may never be born. There are fathers and mothers whose child will no longer open the door. There are spouses whose shared life has suddenly ended, and children who must grow up without a mother or father.

Psychological research shows that the death of a parent during childhood can be associated with anxiety, depression and long-term psychological harm. The World Health Organization also says that almost everyone affected by crises experiences some degree of psychological distress, and that around one in five people exposed to war or conflict face conditions such as depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.

So the circle of victims does not end with those forty thousand people.

A mother whose child has been killed may live with grief for years. A father may lose his former ability to work. The spouse of a victim may suddenly have to shoulder both the household’s financial burden and the raising of the children alone. Brothers and sisters, friends and witnesses to violence are not spared this deep wound and its memories either. When thousands of families go through such an experience at the same time, we are no longer dealing only with private tragedies; we are facing widespread social harm.

The wounded, too, are part of this same catastrophe. Someone who loses their sight, ability to move or part of their physical health may also lose their job, need years of treatment, or require a family member to give up work and their own life to care for them. A single bullet can change several people’s lives at once.

Even having children cannot be separated from this picture. The decision to have a child is also tied to a sense of security, stability and hope for the future. Research into societies affected by insecurity has shown that greater uncertainty can influence reproductive behaviour. When a young person is killed, the possibility of their starting a family and having children may also disappear with them. This cannot be measured precisely with a calculator, but it cannot be ignored.

A bridge can be rebuilt. A factory can be replaced with investment and technology. But a person who has lived for thirty years, gained experience, loved, built a family, become part of a network of human relationships, and had a future and hopes cannot be replaced.

Even if someone else takes over their job, that same person has not returned.

Forty thousand people killed, if we use this assumption, means forty thousand lives brought to a halt and millions of human relationships wounded; it means more than a million years of a future that will never happen. Some of the loss may be expressed in statistics, but a far greater part of it will never appear in any economic table: a kiss that will no longer be placed on a child’s forehead, knowledge that will not be passed on, love left unfinished, and a future killed before it could arrive, and so on…

And the final question is:

If we call the destruction of a bridge or power station the destruction of Iran’s infrastructure, what should we call the killing and wounding of tens of thousands of people in this land?

Source: https://srouzbeh.com/en/posts/entry-1788393321692-e1bb6ebc
Please credit the author and link to this edition.