The number of US military personnel seeking advice about becoming conscientious objectors has increased by 1,000% since the start of the Iran war, according to a US nonprofit.
The Centre on Conscience and War (CCW) advocates for the rights of soldiers refusing to serve on moral grounds, and operates a “GI rights” helpline to help servicepeople with a variety of issues, including conscientious objection.
“I haven’t heard from a single caller who said, ‘I’m scared of dying in a war I don’t believe in,’” Mike Prysner, CCW’s director, told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. “All of them are scared of killing people in a war they don’t believe in.”
Prysner said most people calling for advice referenced the US bombing of a girls’ school in Minab on 28 February, which killed at least 175 people, mostly children.
The illegal US-Israeli war on Iran has killed 3,540 people, including 1,616 civilians and at least 244 were children, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency.
US secretary of war Pete Hegseth said on 2 March that there would be “no stupid rules of engagement” during attacks against Iran, raising fears that this signalled an intention to commit war crimes.
US-Israeli attacks have destroyed or damaged over 113,000 civilian structures, including 90,000 homes, 760 schools or other educational centres and over 300 healthcare facilities, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
A US-Israeli strike on Monday caused significant damage at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, one of the country’s leading scientific universities. Iran’s first vice-president, Mohammad Reza Aref, accused the US of using a bunker-buster bomb – specialised weapons that can destroy reinforced structures by burrowing underground – for the attack, which he said was “a symbol of Trump’s madness and ignorance”.
“He fails to understand that Iran’s knowledge is not embedded in concrete to be destroyed by bombs,” Aref wrote on X. “No barbarity in history has ever been able to strip science from the Iranian people.”
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This gives me hope. I can’t imagine the pain that the people in Iran are going through.
Just as I cannot imagine the suffering from the genocide being committed against the people of Palestine. Just as I can’t imagine the atrocity of the war against the people of Ukraine.