JUST DAYS AGO: Iranian Air Force Pilot Abandons Islam After Seeing Jesus Outside His Fighter Jet
My finger was on the button below me. On that screen, I could see the building.
I could see the outline of the courtyard. I could see the shapes of people gathered there.
Some in wheelchairs, some lying flat, some just sitting in the open air because there was nowhere else to put them.
I knew what they were. I knew exactly what I was looking at. And I had been given one order.
Fire. I pressed the button, nothing happened. I pressed it again. Nothing. I checked the system.
Everything was reading green. Weapon armed. Target locked. System fully operational. I pressed again. Nothing.
My base was in my ear asking me what was happening. I told them I was experiencing a mechanical issue.
They told me to sort it out and complete the mission. I sat in that cockpit 5 minutes from a hospital full of injured people, old men and women and children who had been brought there to be saved from this war.
And I tried everything I knew to make that weapon release. It would not move.
And then a voice spoke to me, not from my headset, not from any radio frequency, from somewhere that had no location, no direction, no explanation.
A voice that went straight through the cockpit walls and straight through my flight helmet and straight into the middle of my chest.
And then I saw him. Everything I believed died in that moment. And something else, something I still do not fully have words for, was born in its place.
My name is Darush Moradi. I am 31 years old. And this is what happened to me 11 days ago.
I grew up in Mashad in a neighborhood called No Gandhi in the shadow of the holy shrine of Imam Raza.
If you have never been to Mashad, let me describe it simply. It is a city where religion is not just practiced.
It is breathed. The call to prayer does not feel like sound there. It feels like the air itself is praying.
I grew up completely wrapped in that. Islam was not something my family chose on Sundays or special occasions.
It was the structure of every single day from the moment we woke up to the moment we close our eyes at night.
My father’s name is Mahmud. He taught mathematics at the secondary school in the Salmon district of Mashad for more than 20 years.
He was a quiet and serious man. Not the kind of father who said tender things with words, but the kind who showed love by never missing a day of work by making sure his children had everything they needed by sitting at the kitchen table every evening and asking about school with complete attention.
I respected him more than any other man I have ever known. That respect would later cost me something I cannot fully describe.
My mother Fatime was the soul of our home. She woke up before the fraer every morning without an alarm.
In my entire childhood, I never once saw her miss a single prayer. She had an old green prayer mat with a faded golden pattern that she kept folded in the corner of her bedroom, a mat that had belonged to her own mother before her.
That mat was her most treasured possession. When I left home for air force training, she pressed a framed Quranic verse into my hands at the front door and said to me, “Darush, wherever you go, Allah goes before you.”
I carried those words with me for years. I repeated them to myself before difficult moments.
I believe them completely. I have two younger sisters, Naris, who is 26, and Saha, who turned 23 just this past January.
They are both beautiful and both sharp-minded. The kind of young women who fill a room with energy the moment they walk in.
I love them in a way I will never be able to properly express. What has happened to my relationship with my family in the past 11 days?
I will come to that part. It is one of the heaviest parts of this story.
Please pray for them when I tell it. I wanted to fly from the time I was about 12 years old.
I am not sure exactly where the desire came from. Perhaps it was watching the military jets pass over Mashad when I was a boy.
Sharp silver shapes cutting across the blue sky right above the golden dome of the shrine.
There was something about the combination of power and total freedom that grabbed something deep inside me and never let go.
By the time I finished secondary school, there was only one path I could imagine for myself.
I applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force officer training program at 19.
I trained for years. I gave up things that young men my age were enjoying.
Normal social life, relationships, rest. I gave all of it without regret because I believed I was building towards something that mattered.
I believed I was serving Allah and Iran. Those two things felt identical to me.
By 27 I was a certified fighter pilot flying the Hayes at Kosa. I was stationed at Shahed Nuja Air Base in Hamadan in western Iran and I had been there nearly 3 years when the war began.
I had a small apartment just outside the base. Simple, a kitchen, one bedroom, a sitting area.
On the wall above my small dining table, I had hung the frame Quranic verse my mother gave me.
I looked at it every morning before leaving for the base. I was proud of my life.
I felt I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I was asleep when the first strikes came on the night of February the 28th, 2026.
The sound woke me just after 2:00 in the morning. A deep rolling thunder that did not stop the way normal thunder stops.
It kept going. I set up immediately and knew in my body before my mind could catch up.
This is not weather. This is something else entirely. Within minutes, my phone was alive with messages.
Within an hour, I was back on base. The atmosphere inside Chahid Noj that night was unlike anything I had experienced in my entire military career.
Grown men who had spent years training for exactly this kind of moment, were walking around with something in their eyes that went beyond fear.
It was a kind of deep disbelief, like the floor beneath every assumption they had ever made had simply dropped away.
The news coming in was catastrophic. Tahhan struck, Isvahan struck, Kom, Karaj, Kman, all hit.
Military installations across the country targeted in the same coordinated wave of American and Israeli air strike.
And then the news that made the entire base go silent for almost a full minute when it came through.
Supreme Leader Ham was dead. The man who had shaped the Islamic Republic for decades, gone in one night.
I stood in the operations room and I remember thinking very clearly, this is a real war now.
Not a confrontation, not an exchange that would cool down after a few days of diplomatic pressure.
A full war. What followed over the next several days only confirmed that the strikes continued.
Our air defense systems were being dismantled one by one. Our own air force was being grounded before it could even respond meaningfully.
Aircraft destroyed on the ground. Bases hit, command structures disrupted. By around the fourth day, we were receiving information through what remained of the command chain that the majority of our operational capacity had been eliminated.
The jet still intact, the pilot still alive and able to fly, were being held in reserve, waiting.
I will be honest with you about what I felt during those days. I was furious, a deep burning fury that I held on to tightly because it felt better than the alternative feeling, which was a fear I did not want to face directly, not the fear of dying, something quieter and more disturbing than that.
A fear that the story I had been told all my life about how strong we were, how prepared we were, how prepeted by both Allah and our military might have had some very large gaps in it.
I pushed that feeling away and held on to the anger. I prayed. I asked Allah for victory.
I asked him to let me do something. Anything. I should have been more careful about what I was asking for.
The morning of March deferred, 2026. Day five of the war. I was called into a closed briefing with two senior officers.
I would not give their names, not to protect them. What they ordered that morning deserves to be answered for somewhere by someone with the authority to do it.
I leave that to God. I don’t give their name simply because I do not want this testimony to become a document about them.
This testimony is about what happened to me, about what I saw. The briefing was short and cold, clinical in the way that the worst kinds of instructions are delivered without emotion, without hesitation, as though what was being described was routine.
The target was a hospital located in the western part of Thran, not far from the Azadi area.
I will not name it fully out of respect for the staff and patients there.
What I was told was this. The mission was an information operation. The strike on a hospital was designed to look like an American or Israeli attack on a civilian medical facility.
Photographs of the aftermath would be released. International media and the United Nations would see the images.
Global outrage would follow. Iran would be positioned as a victim of deliberate war crimes by Washington and Tel Aviv.
International pressure would mount. The narrative of the war would shift. I sat in that room and something inside me went very still and very cold.
I raised my hand. I asked one question. I said, “Are there patients inside right now?”
The senior officer looked at me for a moment before he answered. Then he said, “There are always patients in a hospital, Ahmadi.
That is exactly why it will work. I want to tell you that I refused on the spot.
I want to tell you that I stood up from that chair and said that I will not be part of this and walked out.
But that is not the truth. And I am not going to dress up my own testimony to make myself look like a hero in a moment where I was not one.