Predators
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Regardless, two weeks after the attack, a Pakistani security agent told Reuters that the first two strikes of 2012 had been a “joint operation” between Pakistan and the United States. This source suggested that the two countries had inaugurated a new level of understanding and that Pakistani “spotters” had been used to track the terrorists targeted in the January 10 and January 12 strikes. This source also said, “Our working relationship is a bit different from our political relationship. It’s more productive.” He then provided for the first time details of how the Pakistanis work with the CIA in targeting terrorists: “We run a network of human intelligence sources. Separately, we monitor their cell and satellite phones. Thirdly, we run joint monitoring operations with our U.S. and UK friends. … Al Qaeda is our top priority.” This source further explained that “Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officers, using their own sources, hash out a joint ‘priority of targets lists’ in regular face-to-face meetings. … Once a target is identified and ‘marked,’ his network coordinates with drone operators on the U.S. side. He said the United States bases drones outside Kabul, likely at Bagram airfield about 25 miles north of the capital. From spotting to firing a missile ‘hardly takes about two to three hours.’”149
This extraordinary account of the murky CIA-Pakistani relationship would seem to indicate that the Pakistanis and the Americans had buried the ax following the Salala incident and agreed to continue to work together against their common enemy. It also indicated that the drones were once again operational, and after an almost two-month lull, the CIA’s hunt for Taliban and al Qaeda militants in the hills of Pakistan’s FATA region was on once again. The winter and spring 2012 campaign was halted briefly for two weeks in April after the Pakistani parliament voted to end the strikes, but it continued apace soon thereafter despite repeated Pakistani condemnations.
The strikes picked up in the late spring of 2012, after a brief lull. This period saw the dramatic killing of the new number two in al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al Libi. Libi, a charismatic propagandist who had mocked the Americans on many videotapes calling for jihad, oversaw the day-to-day running of al Qaeda’s external operations while bin Laden and Zawahiri kept a low profile. Libi had actually been captured previously in Afghanistan, but he had escaped from jail in 2007. After surviving several close drone calls, Libi was finally killed early in the morning on June 4, 2012, in a strike on the village of Hassu Khel in North Waziristan. On hearing the welcome news of Libi’s death, an American official stated, “Zawahri will be hard-pressed to find any one person who can readily step into Abu Yahya’s shoes. In addition to his gravitas as a longstanding member of A.Q.’s leadership, Abu Yahya’s religious credentials gave him the authority to issue fatwas [decrees], operational approvals and guidance to the core group in Pakistan and regional affiliates. There is no one who even comes close in terms of replacing the expertise A.Q. has just lost.”150
The death of the skilled al Libi was only the latest killing in the drone war of attrition that had largely dismantled al Qaeda in Pakistan by the spring of 2012. But even as al Qaeda’s core group was systematically taken out in hundreds of strikes in Pakistan, the organization’s regional franchises began to emerge, especially in Yemen, posing a new threat to America.
DRONE STRIKES IN SOMALIA, YEMEN, AND THE PHILIPPINES
The spring 2012 drone campaign was not limited to Pakistan’s tribal regions. Ten days after the failed attempt to kill Hakimullah Mehsud, a CIA drone struck and killed an al Qaeda terrorist in the northeast African country of Somalia. There a militant group known as al Shabab, which had publicly aligned itself with al Qaeda, was trying to take over the country and enforce strict sharia law. Al Shabab had carried out scores of suicide bombings in Somalia; sent a suicide bomber to Uganda, where he killed seventy-six soccer fans watching the World Cup, including an American; and dispatched terrorists to neighboring Kenya, where they killed scores. The group’s interest in projecting terrorism beyond Somalia alarmed the CIA.
Many foreigners, including some Americans of Somali descent from Minneapolis, and Arabs had come to fight alongside al Shabab militiamen and to help them create a strict Islamic state in Somalia and export terrorism. Among them was Bilal al Berjawi, a British-Lebanese Arab who was number two in al Qaeda’s Somali operations, next in rank after an operative who had directed the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He was in charge of the al Shabab’s overseas recruitment, training, and tactics and responsible for the Uganda bombing.
But Berjawi’s career with al Qaeda and al Shabab, which began in 2006, did not last long into the new year. On January 22, 2012, three missiles fired from a drone hit his car near the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Al Shabab issued a statement on the death of this valued operative: “The martyr received what he wished for and what he went out for, as we consider of him and Allah knows him best, when, in the afternoon today, brother Bilal al-Berjawi was exposed to bombing in an outskirt of Mogadishu from a drone that is believed to be American. He was martyred immediately.”151 The UK’s Guardian added a fascinating detail about Berjawi’s assassination: “The 27-year-old’s wife is understood to have given birth to a child in a London hospital a few hours before the missile strike, prompting suspicions among relatives that his location had been pinpointed as a result of a telephone conversation between the couple.”152 In all likelihood the drone that killed Berjawi was flown from a new CIA air base in either the nearby Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, or Arba Minch, Ethiopia (although one source claimed the actual drone was flown by JSOC).153
The strike that killed Berjawi was not the first drone strike in Somalia, nor was it the first JSOC operation in the country. Two al Qaeda leaders had previously been killed in a special operations raid and a bombing there.154 The first reported drone strike in Somalia had occurred on June 23, 2011, and was aimed at two al Shabab/al Qaeda members linked to American-Yemeni al Qaeda leader Anwar al Awlaki. This strike, which was carried out by JSOC, did not kill its intended targets but wounded them. According to the Washington Post, the strike was aimed at a Shabab convoy near the group’s southern base at Kismayo and might have killed a senior al Qaeda leader named Ibrahim al Afghani, who had not been on the original target list.155 In September 2011 local Somalis reported that three Shabab targets were again hit in the area of Kismayo by either CIA or JSOC drones.156
Interestingly enough, these two reports of drone attacks in Somalia led the Iranian Press TV to publish an exaggerated report that fifty-six drone strikes in Somalia had supposedly killed a total of 1,370 people. Although the Press TV reports were uncritically picked up and published as fact by other networks, they were either a flight of fantasy or Iranian propaganda aimed at inciting anti-Americanism.157 Regardless, the strikes in Somalia increased the number of countries where the CIA or JSOC carried out drone operations to seven (the others being Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Libya). It is worth noting that the killer Reaper and Predator drones operating in Somalia have been aided by smaller observation drones, such as Ravens, Scan Eagles, and Fire Scout remote-controlled helicopters, as well as massive Global Hawks.158 In the future unarmed drones may work in conjunction with killer drones to hunt and kill targets.
Following the lull in strikes after the Salala incident, there was an uptake in drone surveillance and strike operations in Yemen in the spring of 2012. These strikes were largely a response to AQAP’s four attempts to blow up jetliners with hidden bombs (including the infamous underwear bomber incident) and successful assassination of almost a hundred Yemenis with a suicide bomb that spring. AQAP had become the most lethal al Qaeda threat following the destruction of most of al Qaeda Central’s membership in the Pakistani drone campaign, and the CIA felt the need to respond.
To compound matters, the chaos in Yemen after President Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in February 2011 allowed al Qaeda militants and an allied group known as Ansar al Sharia to seize power in much of Yemen’s coastal Abyan Province. Their ultimate aim
was, like that of al Shabab in Somalia, to overthrow the country’s secular government and to establish strict sharia law.
In response to these alarming developments, the Obama administration tasked the CIA and JSOC with ramping up an assassination campaign designed to kill AQAP terrorists and weaken related Ansar al Sharia militants. The Pentagon and Langley decided to turn to drones when Tomahawk cruise missile strikes proved to be too clumsy; on one occasion the cruise missiles had caused the deaths of dozens of bedouin civilians.159
The U.S. drone attacks had started off slowly in 2009 but reached a crescendo in the spring of 2012. The stepped up pace of the Yemeni drone campaign can be seen in the following statistics: there were four airstrikes in 2009, ten in 2011, and forty-two in 2012. According to the Long War Journal, which monitors the air campaign, 322 militants and eighty-two civilians have been killed as of March 2013.160 The percentage of civilian deaths is higher in the Yemeni strikes than in the Pakistani drone campaign, but still the Yemini campaign has been the subject of less controversy and opposition than the Pakistani operations. This is largely because the new president of Yemen, Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, has worked closely with the United States to counter the terrorist threat to his country. The Yemeni air force, for example, has also bombed Ansar al Sharia targets in Abyan Province in an attempt to dislodge the militants.161 The Arab media has reported that U.S. trainers are working directly with Yemeni forces to help them retake districts lost to AQAP.162
The Pentagon and CIA drones used in the Yemeni campaign appear to be based at either Camp Lemonier, Djibouti (home to Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa) or at an undisclosed base in Saudi Arabia. The majority of the drone strikes appear to target Shabwah Province, a known hideout for AQAP, which has the support of local tribes there, and Abyan Province, which was largely taken over by Ansar al Sharia militants in 2011. Yemeni sources have reported that JSOC and CIA drones are directly assisting the Yemeni military operations on the ground in these areas.163
The drone strikes in Yemen and the more widely publicized strikes in Pakistan show similar trends. For example, in Yemen the drones seem to be targeting vehicles that can be easily tracked and monitored, instead of houses, in order to avoid civilian collateral damage deaths. As in Pakistan, civilians have nonetheless been killed in Yemen, and this has led to protests by angry relatives of the slain civilians. The United States has also expanded its campaign in Yemen from more limited personality strikes to signature strikes, as happened in Pakistan in 2008.
The uncanny precision of the strikes also indicates that the CIA has established a network of spies and informers in Yemen that has been relaying the positions of terrorists to drones, as in Pakistan’s FATA. Some members of Yemen’s parliament have protested the drone strikes, and militants have started brutally killing those who are said to be spies working to help guide the drones; both of these trends were also found in the Pakistani tribal areas.
As occurred in the early days of the drone strikes in Pakistan, the Yemeni government has tried to deflect domestic criticism of the CIA strikes by claiming that their own air force carried them out. According to cables published on Wikileaks, former Yemeni president Saleh told Gen. David Petraeus in 2010, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” and Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi even admitted to lying to the Yemeni parliament about the American role in the drone strikes.164 Those who knew Yemen’s air force capabilities saw through such claims; the outdated Yemeni MiG 23s and 29s were incapable of making precision strikes on moving vehicles, especially at night.
The major differences between the Yemeni and Pakistani campaigns have been the more prominent role of JSOC in Yemen, the more direct role Obama plays in choosing the targets, and the large role that the drones played in supporting the Yemeni army in its ground operations against the militants in the spring of 2012. The drones, for example, were used to blow up AQAP ammunition depots and to hit the militants’ defensive positions.
The most notable drone assassination strike in Yemen was the May 6, 2012, killing of Fahd al Quoso, an al Qaeda operative involved in both the AQAP plot to bomb passenger planes and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Quoso, who had $5 million bounty on his head, was killed in a personality strike after a Saudi double agent pretending to be an al Qaeda bombing volunteer relayed his coordinates to the CIA. The killing of Quoso as he exited a vehicle was in every way a double-agent reversal of the previous killing of the CIA team in Camp Chapman, Afghanistan, by an al Qaeda triple agent.
In addition to the campaigns in Somalia and Yemen, in February 2012 news of a drone strike on the remote Muslim island of Jolo, in the Philippines, began to surface. The strike killed fifteen militants who belonged to the pro–al Qaeda groups Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah.165 Among those killed were three of the Philippines’s most-wanted terrorists, Zulkifli bin Hir, Gumbahali Jumdail, and Mumanda Ali. These terrorists were involved in the 2002 Bali bombing, which killed or maimed hundreds of Indonesians and foreign tourists (mostly Australians), and in kidnapping to fund terrorism. According to the Washington, D.C.–based Jamestown Foundation, “The airstrike was reported to have been ‘U.S.-led’ and facilitated by an unmanned U.S. drone which tracked down Jumdail by honing in on a sensor that was placed by local villagers pretending to be seeking medical assistance from Jumdail.”166 A previous drone strike in 2006 against a notorious Filipino terrorist named Umar Patek had been claimed by the Philippine government to deflect criticism.167
The strikes in Somalia, Yemen, and the Philippines demonstrate how drones are increasingly used in areas similar to the FATA where a weak or nonexistent central government is combating lightly armed paramilitaries, terrorists, or insurgents who have only rudimentary air defenses. Although it is all but impossible to carry out “snatch operations” in these hostile tribal lands, the remote-control drones give the U.S. military and CIA unprecedented capability to reach out and kill terrorists or insurgents in areas they would otherwise be unable to access.
REPORTS THAT DRONES ATTACK CIVILIANS AT FUNERALS AND KILL RESCUERS WHO COME TO AID DRONE VICTIMS
There has been no group more active in lobbying against the drones than the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. In February 2012 the bureau published a damning article that was picked up by the New York Times, London’s Sunday Times, and other newspapers and bloggers across the globe. The article, titled “Obama Terror Drones: CIA Tactics in Pakistan Include Targeting Rescuers and Funerals,” reported that the drones had killed numerous civilians while they were either trying to help those previously targeted by drones or attending funerals for drone victims.168 A New York Times account of the bureau’s investigation, titled “US Said to Target Rescuers at Drone Sites,” read as follows:
British and Pakistani journalists said Sunday that the C.I.A.’s drone strikes on suspected militants in Pakistan have repeatedly targeted rescuers who responded to the scene of a strike, as well as mourners at subsequent funerals. The report, by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, found that at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile. The bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals. The findings were published on the bureau’s Web site and in The Sunday Times of London.169
After reading the report, antidrone activist Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who heads a British-American charity called Reprieve, which is opposed to drones, said that such “double-tap” strikes “are like attacking the Red Cross on the battlefield. It’s not legitimate to attack anyone who is not a combatant.” Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions as of 2010, concurred with Stafford Smith and added, “Allegations of repeat strikes coming back after half an hour when medical personnel are on the ground are very worrying. To target civilians would be crimes of war.”170 Such reactions were typical among readers, who doubtless envisioned the drones firing on responding paramedics and concerned
civilians desperately trying to dig fellow civilians out of the rubble of a drone strike.
What most stories in the media that covered the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s investigation did not report were the further details found on the bureau’s website. According to the site,
The first confirmed attack on rescuers took place in North Waziristan on May 16, 2009. According to Mushtaq Yusufzai, a local journalist, Taliban militants had gathered in the village of Khaisor. After praying at the local mosque, they were preparing to cross the nearby border into Afghanistan to launch an attack on US forces. But the US struck first [author’s emphasis].
A CIA drone fired its missiles into the Taliban group, killing at least a dozen people. Villagers joined surviving Taliban as they tried to retrieve the dead and injured. But as rescuers clambered through the demolished house the drones struck again. Two missiles slammed into the rubble, killing many more. At least 29 people died in total.
“We lost very trained and sincere friends,” a local Taliban commander told The News, a Pakistani newspaper. “Some of them were very senior Taliban commanders and had taken part in successful actions in Afghanistan. Bodies of most of them were beyond recognition.”171
Essentially, the civilians killed in this drone strike were assisting Taliban militants who, before the drone struck them, had been “preparing to cross the nearby border into Afghanistan to launch an attack on US forces.” The civilians were thus aiding and abetting active Taliban militants whom the Pakistani, Afghan, and U.S. governments consider terrorists. The U.S. government had previously dropped leaflets in the FATA warning local tribesmen that if they assisted the terrorists, they would share their fate.172