Plumes of smoke from two simultaneous strikes rise over Tehran, Iran, on 2 March 2026. Photograph: Mohsen Ganji/AP
Religious freedom group says 200 troops sent complaints of superiors using extremist Christian rhetoric to justify war
US military commanders have been invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical “end times” to justify involvement in the Iran war to troops, according to complaints made to a watchdog group.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) says it has received more than 200 complaints from service members across all branches of the armed forces, including the marines, air force and space force.
One complainant, identified as a noncommissioned officer (NCO) in a unit that could be deployed “at any moment to join” operations against Iran, told MRFF in a complaint viewed by the Guardian that their commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ”.
“He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”, the NCO added.
Former Labour Party leader co-founder and leader, Jeremy Corbyn, takes part in the protest against the war with Iran in Parliament Square, as the USA and Israel launch attacks on Iran. Photo by Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
“Blair dragged the UK into an illegal war that triggered a spiral of hatred, conflict, and misery,” Corbyn said. “Twenty-three years later, another Labour prime minister is doing his best to follow in Blair’s footsteps.”
As UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer allows British bases to be used as part of the US-Israeli war against Iran, the former leader of his Labour Party says he’s making the same mistake that another Labour PM made 23 years ago.
Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist member of Parliament who led Labour from 2015 to 2020, said on Tuesday that Starmer was “echoing Tony Blair’s obedience to Washington”, referring to the then-prime minister’s decision in 2003 to join US President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.
“Ignoring the wisdom of ordinary people who could see the catastrophe ahead, Blair dragged the UK into an illegal war that triggered a spiral of hatred, conflict, and misery. More than a million Iraqi men, women, and children paid the price.” Corbyn wrote in a Tuesday piece for the democratic socialist publication Tribune.
Infamously pledging to Bush, “I will be with you, whatever,” Blair helped to promote the false claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And despite a lack of support from the United Nations, he joined Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” committing 46,000 British troops to the war.
“This was the last time a Labour prime minister blindly backed the wishes of the US and its warmongering president,” Corbyn said. “Twenty-three years later, another Labour prime minister is doing his best to follow in Blair’s footsteps and drag us into a catastrophic, illegal war.”
Unlike Bush, US President Donald Trump has not yet put boots on the ground in Iran, instead waging a destructive campaign of aerial bombings and missile strikes that have taken out the nation’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior Iranian officials.
As of Monday, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), a US-based monitor of human rights in Iran, reported that at least 742 civilians had been killed since Saturday by US and Israeli attacks, with nearly 1,000 injured and more than 600 deaths still under review.
While Starmer has stressed that the UK “had no role” in launching the war, he has lent credence to the questionable case the US and Israel have made to justify it, including emphasizing that Iran “must never have nuclear weapons.”
Iran has always contended its nuclear program was not for military purposes, and it had no desire to produce a nuclear weapon. Prior to Saturday’s strikes, reports indicated that Iranian negotiators had offered to give up the nation’s entire stockpile of enriched uranium.
And though he has accused Iran of launching “indiscriminate strikes” across the Gulf, Starmer has been reticent to criticize similar actions by the US and Israel, which have had vastly larger death tolls, including the bombing of a girls’ school that reportedly killed 165 people, most of them girls between ages 7 and 12, and attacks on several hospitals.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer says that “Britain will not” join forces with strikes on Iran carried out by the US and Israel.
The UK is allowing American forces to use its bases in the region to help launch attacks, but stresses the UK military will only act defensively. pic.twitter.com/8fqPOxPLMp
One day after the first strikes were conducted, and following mounting pressure from Trump, Starmer announced that he’d given the US approval for “specific, limited defensive” use of three Royal Air Force (RAF) bases—Fairford in England, Akrotiri in Cyprus, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean—in order to destroy Iran’s missiles “at source” after a drone hit Akrotiri, causing minimal damage.
However, Starmer continued to claim that the UK had learned the “mistakes of Iraq,” and “will not join offensive action now.”
Corbyn said that Starmer’s insistence that bases would only be used “defensively” was merely “meaningless vocabulary that reveals Starmer’s contempt for the intelligence of the British people.”
In Parliament on Monday, Starmer said that “the use of the bases is to allow the US to use its ability to take out the ability of Iran to launch the attacks in the first place.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday used similar reasoning to justify launching the war, explaining that Iran was likely to retaliate against a planned Israeli attack and that it therefore posed an “imminent threat” to US personnel even though that threat was contingent on Israel attacking first.
Corbyn described the idea of a “preemptive strike” as a contradiction in terms. “Under this convoluted reasoning,” he said, “almost any attack on anybody can be classified as a defensive measure. Starmer’s words are Newspeak—and cannot shield his government from complicity in the devastation ahead.”
Mark my words: Starmer’s decision to drag Britain into another illegal war will prove to be a catastrophic, historic mistake. pic.twitter.com/2iSFpnDHdw
Like in the United States, the British public has expressed low support for American and Israeli actions against Iran. According to a YouGov poll published on Monday, 49% disapprove of US military action, compared to 28% who support it. Fewer than 1 in 5 Labour voters said they supported it.
Voters also said they oppose their government’s involvement. Compared with just 32% of Brits who said they supported letting the US use British bases, 50% said they opposed it.
“For too long, Britain has blindly followed the US as it indulges in disastrous imperial fantasies,” Corbyn said, noting the UK’s continued support for Israel over two years of US-sponsored genocide in Gaza.
Corbyn is now an independent MP who co-founded a new political party after being thrown out of Labour in 2020 over dubious accusations of antisemitism, which he has alleged stem from his strong criticism of Israel.
“It’s time to forge a different path. Now is not the time to try to rescue a ‘special relationship’ characterised by impunity, genocide, and war,” he said. “Now is the time to forge an independent foreign policy based on international law and peace.”
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of PeaceOrcas discuss rotting brain. Front Orca says “Wish someone would lock him up”.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Monday gave an update to the Human Rights Council on the situation in El Fasher, Sudan. Photo: screenshot
As the war grinds on well past 1,000 days, famine grips more and more areas in what is already the country with high levels of hunger
“We can only expect worse to come” in Sudan if the war is not stopped, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned the Human Rights Council on February 9, as famine conditions expand in the country facing the highest levels of hunger in the world.
Apart from Gaza, which has been suffering Israel’s genocidal war since October 2023, there are only two officially declared ongoing famines in the world – both in this North African country, in the throes of a civil war raging for nearly three years.
One of them is in South Kordofan State’s capital, Kadugli, gripped by famine since last September, following a prolonged siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fighting its former ally, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), since April 2023.
Also besieged further north was the state’s second largest city, Dilling, where hunger levels “are likely similar to Kadugli, but cannot be classified due to insufficient reliable data – a result of restricted humanitarian access and ongoing hostilities,” the UN had said.
Siege broken, but relief may be “temporary”
Earlier, on February 3, the SAF announced it had broken the siege on Kadugli, days after making a similar advance, taking control of the supply routes to Dilling in late January, reconnecting the two cities to North Kordofan.
With the markets re-supplied, prices of essential food items in Kadugli have dropped to a fraction of what they had surged to under siege, Sudan Tribune reported on February 8.
However, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) had cautioned in its report on February 5 that the relief for its residents may only be “temporary”. It warned of the possibility “that Famine will persist through May in the absence of a ceasefire and sustained humanitarian access. It is expected that the towns will remain heavily contested, and the risk is high that renewed siege-like conditions will be re-established between February and May.”
Drone attacks on food trucks amid famine
Türk also highlighted this volatility in his briefing to the Human Rights Council on February 9. Although the SAF and its allied armed groups have broken the siege on these cities, “drone strikes by both sides continue, resulting in dozens of civilian deaths and injuries,” he added.
Two days before, on February 7, the RSF had killed at least 24 people (including eight children, among them infants) with a drone strike on a humanitarian convoy transporting residents fleeing the fighting in South Kordofan State’s Dubeiker area to North Kordofan in the city of Rahad.
A day earlier, one was killed and many more wounded in the drone attack on a convoy of the World Food Program (WFP), en route to supplying aid to the displaced people sheltering in North Kordofan’s capital, El Obeid.
Building earthen walls around El Obeid, the SAF is holding out against the RSF to defend this strategic city enroute to the national capital, Khartoum, from the Darfur region in western Sudan. The RSF has taken control over most of this region after overrunning North Darfur State’s capital, El Fasher, also in the throes of famine since last September.
“Mass atrocities committed in Darfur may repeat Kordofan”: warns the UN
After laying a siege for over 500 days and starving the residents of this last major city in the five states of Darfur holding against the RSF, the paramilitary overran its defenses in late October. Barely two months later, satellite imagery analysis by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) had confirmed that the city had been depopulated by the RSF after likely killing tens of thousands of its residents.
“My Office sounded the alarm about the risk of mass atrocities in the besieged city of El Fasher for more than a year,” Türk added in his briefing, regretting, “The threat was clear, but warnings were not heeded.” He went on to warn, “I am extremely concerned that these violations and abuses may be repeated in the Kordofan region,” which has become the center of fighting since the fall of El Fasher.
Famine-conditions spread in Darfur
An estimated 127,000 people have managed to escape El Fasher and its surrounding areas, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). A large number of them fled toward the Chadian border, sheltering in northwestern reaches of Darfur in towns like Um Baru and Kernoi, and further west in the border town of El Tine, where militias allied with the SAF and local self-defense groups are still holding fort against the RSF.
With this influx increasing the strain on the limited resources of these remote towns, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) data released on February 6 confirmed that hunger levels, already classified as “catastrophic”, have exceeded the “famine” threshold. Over half of all children in Um Baru, and 34% in Kernoi, are suffering acute malnutrition.
”Many other conflict-affected or inaccessible areas may also be facing similarly catastrophic conditions; however, the full extent remains unknown due to limited access and uncertainty over how rapidly conditions are deteriorating,” the IPC report added.
With millions suffering malnutrition across Sudan, especially in Darfur and Kordofan regions, Action Against Hunger has warned that “more than 375,000 people are at real risk of starvation.”
Fishermen work in the Gulf of Paria, an inlet of the Caribbean Sea, on November 06, 2025, in Icacos Point, Trinidad and Tobago. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“We want this case to help stop these killings from taking place again,” said the American lawyer representing the family.
Family members of a Colombian fisherman killed in one of the Trump administration’s illegal strikes on boats in the Caribbean is preparing to take legal action over what they describe as the murder of their loved one.
The New York Timesreported Thursday that the family of Alejandro Carranza “has hired an American lawyer, who said he was preparing a legal claim.”
The lawyer, Dan Kovalik, told the Times that the impending case is important both because “the family deserves compensation for the loss” of Alejandro and, more broadly to stop the Trump administration from killing people with impunity.
“We want this case to help stop these killings from taking place again,” Kovalik said. “This is murder, and it is destroying rule of law.”
The description of Carranza’s killing as murder aligns with the views of United Nations experts and human rights advocates who have characterized the Trump administration’s bombings in international waters as extrajudicial killings. To date, the administration has carried out at least 19 strikes on vessels in international waters, killing an estimated 75-80 people in total.
“I never thought I would lose my father in this way,” said Cheila Carranza, Alejandro’s 14-year-old daughter.
Trump has claimed, without providing any evidence, that the targeted vessels were smuggling drugs to the US. Though his body has yet to be found, Carranza is believed to have been killed in an attack in the Caribbean on September 15, part of the Trump administration’s broader military campaign and buildup in the region that has sparked fears of a direct US war with Venezuela and other nations.
The attack infuriated Colombia President Gustavo Petro, who suspended intelligence cooperation with the US in response and accused the Trump administration of trampling international law.
“If intelligence communications only serve to kill fishermen with missiles, it is not only irrational, but a crime against humanity, insofar as the murder of civilians is systematic,” Petro wrote in a lengthy social media post earlier this week.
“Colombia respects international law and defends it because it is the only wall we have as a human civilization against the barbarism that threatens to take over all of humanity,” he added.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in Downing Street, London, on his first official visit to Britain, July 17, 2025
…
Just 12 per cent of the public approve of the government’s record, a historic low. Current polling shows the great majority of Labour MPs losing their seats at the next election, either to Reform, or to the new left party struggling to be born, or in Scotland and Wales to nationalist parties.
Certainly, at present it is as easy to see the suspended four — and the already-whipless John McDonnell and Apsana Begum who rebelled a year ago against the two-child benefit cap — securing re-election as independents than as candidates of the Starmer regime.
It is certainly hard to see this move breaking resistance to the new austerity agenda going forward. Only successful leaders can hope to get away with this sort of crackdown.
So this latest exercise in authoritarianism speaks only to Starmer’s loss of capacity to advance his right-wing agenda, as well as to his consigliere Morgan McSweeney’s blinkered view that whatever the problem is the answer lies in attacking the left.
But it is also a challenge to the Labour left. Over the last five years it has consistently failed to find the means to arrest the Starmer-McSweeney purge of the left, often for want of the simple virtue of sticking together when under attack.
The response to the latest suspensions has been robust, in words at least. The left has shown it can inflict defeats on the government, reversing specific policy proposals.
But it is now beyond obvious that only a fighting plan to actually oust Starmer himself has any prospect of reversing Labour’s dismal prospects in time to save the next election. They should take every opportunity — and even create them — to express no-confidence in this government of austerity, war and authoritarianism.
Failure to do so will certainly turbocharge the case for the new socialist party being promoted by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. The appeal of that venture rests in part on the perception that Labour is a lost cause.
Starmer’s latest sanctions against dissent tend to make that case. He has flung down the gauntlet — the left in the PLP, the affiliated unions and the membership must pick it up.
Keir Starmer justifies why he has to travel abroad so muchKeir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in Downing Street, London, on his first official visit to Britain, July 17, 2025
