Srinagar, April 23 -- Srinagar- War is often counted in numbers-casualties, strikes, targets-but its truest measure lies in what cannot be counted: the absence that lingers, the lives that vanish without trace, the grief that finds no closure.

For the parents of seven-year-old Makan Nasiri, that absence is absolute.

They are the only family among the dead of the Shajareh Tayyebeh (The Pure Tree) elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, who have been unable to bury their child. When the school was struck on February 28-the first day of attacks across Iran by the United States and Israel-156 people were killed, most of them children. Every victim was accounted for. Except one.

Makan.

Washington has remained silent on the strike, but e...