Even the targeted militant groups have joined in: for a couple of years, the Taliban have been using armed commercial drones to attack their enemies, portraying drones as technologically superior-just as American officials had done before them. “They identified hundreds of those killed as simply Afghan or Pakistani fighters,” or as “unknown,” the report stated.Īnd yet many US military officials and politicians continue to spin the drone narrative.
It also underlined that the CIA itself, which was responsible for the strikes in the country, did not know the affiliation of everyone they killed. As far back as 2014, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that only 4% of drone victims in Pakistan were identified as militants linked to Al-Qaeda. Most of those targets are men who are still alive, like the Haqqanis, or Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who just published another book while thousands of people have been murdered by drones instead of him. More than 1,100 people in Pakistan and Yemen were killed between 20 during the hunt for 41 targets, according to the British human rights organization Reprieve. “This kind of warfare is wrong on so many levels.” “The truth is that we could not differentiate between armed fighters and farmers, women, or children, ” Lisa Ling, a former drone technician with the US military who has become a whistleblower, told me. Instead, America left a long trail of Afghan blood in its attempts to kill him and his associates. In fact, he evaded the allegedly precise drones for more than a decade, eventually dying of natural causes in a hideout mere miles from a sprawling US base. But afterward, he was not found among them. Operators pushed the button to kill Omar, firing two Hellfire missiles at a group of bearded Afghans in loose robes and turbans. An armed Predator drone flew over the southern province of Kandahar, known as the Taliban’s capital, which was the home of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the group’s supreme leader. That day the first drone operation in history took place. On October 7, 2001, the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in order to topple the Taliban regime.
In fact, America’s last drone strike in Afghanistan-its last high-profile act of violence-was eerily similar to its very first one. In fact, American's last drone strike in Afghanistan was eerily similar to its first one. “It was a tragic mistake,” the Pentagon said during a press conference, as it was forced to admit that the strike had killed innocent civilians with no links to ISIS. A detailed report by the New York Times forced Washington to retract its earlier claims. With so much attention being paid to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, international media outlets started to arrive, too. First, local Afghan television channels, like Tolo News, showed the family members of the victims. Journalists and investigators could visit the site, which meant they could easily fact-check everything the United States was claiming-and what had actually happened soon became clear. But this strike took place in the middle of the country’s capital.
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