President William Ruto, the Kenyan lackey of imperialism, has condemned the retaliatory strikes by Iran following the coordinated imperialist assault by the United States, the world’s pre-eminent military power, and its nuclear-armed and genocidal ally, Israel.

The attack included the murder of Iran’s head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, other senior leaders of the Iranian government, and the killing of hundreds of civilians in major cities across Iran, including schoolchildren.

In response, Ruto posted on X, “Kenya strongly condemns the strikes on the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain in the evolving conflict in the Middle East. It is evident that the regionalisation of this conflict poses a grave threat to international peace and security.”

Iran, the victim of the unprovoked and illegal attack by Washington and Jerusalem, was not even mentioned.

Responding to Ruto’s statement, Iran’s Ambassador to Kenya Ali Gholampour countered, “Right before this aggression in Iran, our authority has, time and again, declared and announced that Iran must defend itself… All the bases and facilities that are in the services of the US and the Zionist regime of Israel will be legitimate targets.” He subsequently clarified that US bases in Kenya would not be targeted.

The US-Israeli assault on Iran is waged in flagrant violation of the US Constitution and international law. The assault was launched while US and Iranian negotiators were still engaged in talks, which Israel has confirmed were a ruse as far as Washington was concerned with a plan to launch the attack a week earlier thwarted for logistical reasons. The aim is to install a puppet regime in Iran that would open its vast oil and gas reserves to Western corporations and fully integrate the country into Washington’s war preparations against China.

Ruto, himself once indicted by the International Criminal Court over crimes against humanity related to 2007 post-election violence, is aiming to draw Nairobi ever more tightly into Washington’s agenda of global domination through military means. He seeks to consolidate Kenya’s position as a major non-NATO ally and a strategic anchor state for Washington’s operations in the Horn of Africa.

Nairobi already hosts foreign military bases that tie it directly to Western military strategy, including the British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK) in Laikipia and the US Camp Simba base at Manda Bay. They serve as training, logistics and air strike hubs for operations across East Africa and the Indian Ocean region.

Months into office, Ruto backed the genocide in Palestine. The current war arises directly out of the post-October 2023 US-Israeli drive to impose a “final solution” to the Palestinian question as part of the assertion of unbridled US imperialist control over the Middle East.

Kenyan troops remain deployed in Somalia against the al-Shabaab insurgency. Located at the entrance to the Red Sea, Somalia sees around $700 billion in maritime shipping pass by its coast every year, including nearly all of Europe’s trade with Asia. It is one of Washington’s chokepoints in case of war against China.

Ruto has extended this role beyond East Africa. He has dispatched special forces funded by Washington, known for their brutality in anti-terror operations, to the Western Hemisphere’s most impoverished country Haiti to terrorise the population and ensure gang warfare does not precipitate an outflow of refugees to the US and Canada, and destabilise the Caribbean region.

Nairobi has also sent “peacekeeping” troops to Congo’s mineral-rich east to stabilise the war-torn region and allow imperialism to plunder minerals such as cassiterite, columbite-tantalite, wolframite, beryl, gold, and monazite. Congo’s resources are viewed by Washington and its European imperialist allies as key to waging war against Beijing.

Ruto has no cares for the fate of the 400,000 Kenyan workers scattered across the Middle East who may become victims of this imperialist war. The Kenyan elite has long treated these workers, primarily women employed as domestic servants, as well as guards, drivers, airport staff, and construction labourers, with disdain.

Recruited through private agencies linked to Kenya’s political class, including Ruto’s own family, they are sent into restrictive sponsorship systems that bind their legal status to their employers and leave them vulnerable to passport confiscation, unpaid wages, and physical abuse. The export of labour has become a lucrative channel of enrichment for the Kenyan bourgeoisie.

The Kenyan ruling elite will also be concerned about its $261 million in property investments in Dubai’s opaque real estate market—approximately 0.3 percent of Kenya’s GDP. Much of this wealth was looted from the Kenyan state and shielded behind shell companies and secrecy laws in the United Arab Emirates.

Ruto will be personally concerned by how the war will affect his business dealings in the Sudan Civil War. Nairobi is a bridge in the trade of gold plundered by the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces militia, whose networks are deeply intertwined with Gulf markets.

For the Kenyan masses, the imperialist war will be felt immediately in the price of fuel, food, and transport.

The effects will unfold in a society marked by staggering inequality. A minuscule layer of the super-rich has amassed obscene fortunes: the richest 125 individuals now control more wealth than 77 percent of the population—over 42 million people. Meanwhile, average real wages have fallen by 11 percent since 2020, while the cost of food has surged by roughly 50 percent over the same period.

Public spending continues to face cuts under the boot of IMF-dictated austerity, exposing millions to collapsing health and education.

The war on Iran comes just weeks after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended a neo-colonial programme of predation and domination as a “civilisational mission” in the Munich Security Conference. Rubio urged Europe to cast off “guilt and shame” over empire and openly lamented the decline of the “great Western empires.”

For the Kenyan masses, such rhetoric is a warning. They know very well what this “civilisational mission” means. Under British colonial rule, Africans were reduced to semi-slave labour through the kipande system—metal identification passes worn around the neck, fingerprints recorded, employment histories monitored by the state. Movement without permission was criminalised.

This colonial architecture existed to guarantee a tightly controlled workforce for settler estates carved out of stolen land and reserved for European settlers, while Africans were driven into overcrowded reserves. Alongside dispossession came cultural assault. Christian missionaries worked day and night to destroy people’s languages and spiritual systems. Tribes, once a fluid identity, became entrenched as part of divide-and-rule, a legacy that is whipped up today by the Kenyan elite.

When masses resisted, the response was brutal and murderous. Strikers and protesters were shot and leaders jailed in the 1920s and 1930s. During the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, British authorities unleashed counterinsurgency terror: detention camps, kangaroo courts, forced villagisation, and collective punishment.

As many as 300,000 people may have died from violence, starvation, disease, and abuse in the camps. Survivors recounted beatings, castrations, and the forced insertion of broken glass bottles into women’s vaginas. Dedan Kimathi, leader of the Mau Mau, was captured, subjected to a show trial, and executed in 1957; another 1,100 Kenyans were hanged.

When the British flag was lowered, hopes that formal independence would ensure social equality were soon dashed. The post-independence regimes led by Jomo Kenyatta and later Daniel arap Moi, backed by Washington and London, carried forward a system of land looting while intensifying repression against the left and Somali communities. In Nairobi, the basement cells of Nyayo House became infamous torture dungeons where left-wing activists and students were detained without trial, beaten, electrocuted, and waterboarded. Western governments continued to arm and fund these regimes.

The Ruto regime has retained the full backing of Western governments as security forces have killed at least 246 protesters and detained thousands over the past year, after demonstrations erupted against the soaring cost of living, tax hikes, and austerity measures dictated by the IMF.

Ruto’s statement has been met with contempt by broad layers of the Kenyan masses. Hundreds of replies on X, along with comments on Instagram and Facebook and beneath online newspaper articles, voice a common sentiment: his statement does not represent Kenyan workers. But anger on social media is not enough. It must be transformed into a conscious political struggle against imperialism and the capitalist system that breeds war.