From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow.

This is the Daily.

On Wednesday, American officials conceded what's become increasingly clear from investigative reporting by the Times

that the United States military

was responsible for the airstrike that destroyed an elementary school in Iran, killing

at least 175 people, most of them small children.

Today, my colleagues, Maliki Brown and Julian Barnes, on what led to one of the most devastating

military errors in decades.

It's Thursday, March 12th.

Maliki, it feels like in a very real sense, you were among the first people in the world,

perhaps outside the military, to understand that this devastating airstrike was likely carried out by the United States,

a determination that has now been confirmed preliminarily by an American military investigation.

Well, Michael, I'm not sure about that, but we suspected that something went terribly wrong as soon as we started looking at it.

Well, now that this is no longer a suspicion, but something that feels so more or less firm, I want to go back to when this all happened.

Because the timing of it is important. It happened around the same moment that the U.S. and Israel killed Iran's supreme leader, and all the world's eyes were on that.

And this other airstrike was more or less in parallel, but getting a lot less attention at first. But once we all

realized what had happened, it was shocking. This was a elementary school blown up by a missile

and 175 civilians, mostly children were killed. So I just want to talk for a moment about the

scale of this.

Yes, it has devastated Minab, the town where this school was located. Saturday morning is the start

of the week and the school week in Iran. So school was in session. The teachers union there said that

over 260 students were in the school at the time.

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