Diary Entry

The news arrives like dispatches from a shadow war - bridges, steel plants, pharmaceutical facilities struck in quick succession. I cannot help but note the incongruity: bridges that once bore the weight of commerce now lie twisted in the river, yet the factories producing medicines are also in ruins. What strategic calculus places a steel mill and a dispensary in the same target list?

The videos, grainy and abrupt, show only the aftermath - smoke curling from skeletal structures, the odd bicycle left leaning against a wall, untouched. The precision is chilling. One imagines the planners in their rooms, maps spread, marking coordinates with the same detached efficiency with which I might trace a mountain pass.

But the human element persists. A pharmacist in Isfahan must now reckon with the loss of his livelihood, just as the steelworker watches his furnace go cold. War has always been thus - an inventory of destruction, itemized and delivered without ceremony.

And yet, I think of the roads I have traveled, how a single bomb could render them impassable, how quickly the infrastructure of daily life unravels. The outsider sees what the strategist overlooks: that a bridge is not merely a crossing, but the sum of a thousand small journeys.