![]() ![]() It acknowledged there had been as many as 116 civilian deaths as a result of those strikes, 4% of the reported casualties.īut Jennifer Gibson at human rights group Reprieve says the organisation has tracked a high rate of errors. In a rare piece of disclosure, the US said 473 air strikes (from both drones and planes, the figures are not separated out) had been made against targets outside Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria between January 2009 and December 2015. Precise figures, however, are hard to establish as much of the information is classified. The reality is that civilians have been hit in strike after strike as targets are misidentified. In Trump’s first year and 11 months in office 238 drone strikes were launched. In Obama’s first two years in office, 20, 186 drone strikes were launched in Pakistan, Syria and Yemen, according figures supplied to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The practice began under George W Bush, was expanded under Barack Obama and appears to have increased further still under Donald Trump, although in March he made analysis harder by signing an executive order banning reporting of drone casualty details. Satellite image of Aramco’s Abqaiq oil processing facility in Buqyaq, Saudi Arabia after a missile and drone strike on the kingdom’s oil industry. ![]() ![]() In four years of war against Isis in Iraq and Syria from 2014-2018, Reaper drones were deployed on more than 2,400 missions – almost two a day. Predator and Reaper drones have since been deployed by the US in Afghanistan and the northern, tribal areas of Pakistan in various iterations of the “war on terror”, as well as in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria.īritish statistics give some idea of the frequency of contemporary drone strikes (the US does not release equivalent data). Some of his bodyguards were killed in a vehicle outside the leader’s compound instead. But the first strike, in October 2001, missed its intended target, Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Predator drones had already observed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader, from the skies. Weaponisation came almost immediately after 9/11. ![]() Proliferation is expected to continue, not least because Russia and India are running behind. Iran was blamed for an attack on Saudi oil installations in September believed to have involved drones as well as missiles. Since 2016, Turkey has used drones heavily, against the separatist Kurdish PKK in its own country, in northern Iraq and more recently against Kurdish groups in Syria.Ĭhina, meanwhile, has begun supplying a range of countries with its Wing Loong and CH series drones, including to the UAE – where they have been used in a string of deadly strikes in Libya – as well as Egypt Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, although not every country has been able to deploy what it has bought. Israel develops its own technology.ĭrones rapidly proliferated in a second wave over the past five years, with Pakistan and Turkey developing their own programmes. The US and UK rely on Predator and latterly Reaper drones made by General Atomics, a Californian company owned by billionaire brothers Neal and Linden Blue. The first phase of drone warfare was dominated by three countries: the US, the UK and Israel. The RAF operates nine missile-bearing Reaper drones, one of which is in repair it plans to buy 16 next-generation Protector drones by 2023 at an initial cost of £415m.Ĭhart Which countries are the main users of drones? It is a world in which the UK is a relatively small but still influential power. Weaponised drones are not cheap: experts say the starting price for the technology is about $15m (£12m) per unit, with more for add-ons, on top of the training and the crews needed to pilot them. Analysts at information group Jane’s estimate that more than 80,000 surveillance drones and almost 2,000 attack drones will be purchased around the world in the next 10 years. The vast majority of the many thousands of military drones are used for surveillance, and defence experts predict that will continue. Weapons on drones were first deployed almost immediately after 9/11, their usage since has been bound up with the so-called “war on terror”. Military technology has also advanced, albeit more slowly, and the principal drones used now are evolutions of the technology first deployed to spot hidden Serbian positions during the 1999 Kosovo war. ![]()
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