A similar incident took place in Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, when drone pilots noticed three trucks, which they mistook for a Taliban convoy, and attacked them with missiles. Unfortunately, the trucks were packed with civilians, and as many as twenty-three noncombatants were incinerated in an instant by drone Hellfires. A U.S. general who investigated the attack on the civilians found that “information that the convoy was anything other than an attacking force was ignored or downplayed” by the overly eager Predator crew whose reporting was “inaccurate and unprofessional.”43 In fact, the drone operators followed the civilian convoy of trucks for three and half hours analyzing its pattern-of-life movement before firing on it and massacring its members. It was only after the strike that drone pilots noticed terrified women survivors waving clothing to surrender to their airborne attackers as they carried babies from the convoy’s wreckage.44 It is likely that in both of these instances of misidentification trigger-happy drone operators gave into the urge to use their technology to mistakenly kill fellow Americans and unarmed Afghan civilians without full humint support. It can be theorized that the same thing has happened in Pakistan as well.
Several other drone errors have cost innocent people their lives. There is, for example, the case of Jabr al Shabwani, a deputy provincial governor in Yemen who met with a local al Qaeda leader to arrange a truce in October 2010. During the meeting a drone fired its missiles into the gathering, killing the popular Shabwani, five of his bodyguards, and the al Qaeda leader. According to Reuters, “The killing so angered Shabwani’s tribesmen that in the subsequent weeks they fought heavily with government security forces, twice attacking a major oil pipeline in Maarib.”45 Once again a drone strike proved to be a recruiter for anti-American militancy.
Another strike that demonstrates that the drones are only as good as their ground intelligence took place in Turkey. On November 22, 2011, the United States flew its last Predator and Reaper drones out of Iraq but transferred four of them to Turkey (smaller surveillance drones were, however, kept in Iraq to protect the massive U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad). At the time the Turkish government announced that it would be in charge of the four Predator drones’ operations in their country. It was assumed that the drones, which were based at Incirlik Air Base in southeastern Turkey, would be used to monitor the Iraqi-Turkish border. Specifically, they would monitor the infiltration of Kurdish guerrillas coming into Turkey from Iraq to fight for independence against Turkish troops.
On December 29, 2011, one of the drones spotted what appeared to be a group of Kurdish insurgents sneaking across the border from Iraq to Turkey.46 It then transmitted their location to Turkish F-16 fighter jets, which bombed the group approximately fifteen minutes later. At least thirty-five were killed in the strike. But it later became known that far from being Kurdish guerrillas, the men who were attacked were simply Kurdish smugglers sneaking into Turkey with cigarettes and fuel. Restless Kurds throughout Turkey staged mass protests over the killing of the smugglers, and the case once again proved that for all the technology at their fingertips, the drone pilots were not infallible. It was the largest Kurdish civilian death toll in a single strike in Turkey’s three-decade-long war with the Kurdish insurgents.
Sky News reported the aftermath of the errant strike as follows: “Television images showed a line of corpses covered by blankets on a barren hillside, with a crowd of people gathered around—some with their heads in their hands and crying. People loaded the bodies onto donkeys which were led down the hill to be loaded into vehicles and taken to hospital in the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country. Security sources said the people killed had been carrying canisters of diesel on mules and that their bodies were found on the Iraqi side of the border.” A local mayor said, “We have 30 corpses, all of them are burned. The state knew that these people were smuggling in the region. This kind of incident is unacceptable. They were hit from the air.”47 To compound matters, most of those who were killed in the strike were Kurdish teenagers whose fathers belonged to a clan that actually fought for the Turkish government against the Kurdish insurgents.48 This fact suggests that the decision to carry out the deadly strike on the Kurdish smugglers was made without the benefit of any supporting ground humint whatsoever.
A similar errant strike took place in Radaa, Yemen, in September 2012 and led to the death of thirteen civilians. In this case, the drones hit a civilian vehicle traveling near a targeted terrorist vehicle. At the time the Yemeni government apologized for the mistake and said, “This was one of the very few times when our target was completely missed. It was a mistake, but we hope it will not hurt our anti-terror efforts in the region.” Grieving family members tried unsuccessfully to carry the bodies of the slain victims to the capital. When the government blocked their passage, a Yemeni who was near the strike angrily said, “You want us to stay quiet while our wives and brothers are being killed for no reason. This attack is the real terrorism.”49
In her groundbreaking 2009 article on the cost of the drone war for the New Yorker, Jane Mayer wrote, “Cut off from the realities of the bombings in Pakistan, Americans have been insulated from the human toll, as well as from the political and the moral consequences. Nearly all the victims have remained faceless, and the damage caused by the bombings has remained unseen.”50 Several well-known civilian victims, however, have provided us faces and names to represent all the innocents who have died in the drone attacks. Chief among them was a young antidrone activist named Tariq Khan. Following is a BBC account of his death:
When tribal elders from the remote Pakistani region of North Waziristan travelled to Islamabad last week to protest against CIA drone strikes, a teenager called Tariq Khan was among them. A BBC team caught him on camera, sitting near the front of a tribal assembly, or jirga, listening carefully.
Four days later the 16-year-old was dead—killed by one of the drones he was protesting against. In his final days, Tariq was living in fear, according to Neil Williams from the British legal charity, Reprieve, who met him at the Jirga. “He was really petrified,” said Mr Williams, “and so were his friends. He didn’t want to go home because of the drones. They were all scared.”
Tariq carried with him the identity card of his teenage cousin, Asmar Ullah, who was killed by a drone. On Monday he shared his fate. Tariq’s family says he was hit by two missiles as he was driving near Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan. The shy teenager, who was good with computers, was decapitated in the strike. His 12-year-old cousin Wahid was killed alongside him.
The boys were on their way to see a relative, according to Tariq’s uncle, Noor Kalam, who we reached by phone. He denied that Tariq had any link to militant groups. “We condemn this very strongly,” he said. “He was just a normal boy who loved football.”51
In the aftermath of the deaths of Tariq Khan and his twelve-year-old cousin, an unnamed U.S. official said of the strike that killed him, “On that day no child was killed; in fact, the adult males were supporting al-Qaeda’s facilitation network and their vehicle was following a pattern of activity used by al-Qaeda facilitators.”52
Another civilian casualty of the drone campaign was Saadullah, whose death was reported as follows:
Many senior commanders from the Taliban and al-Qaeda are among the dead. But campaigners claim there have been hundreds of civilian victims, whose stories are seldom told. A shy teenage boy called Saadullah is one of them. He survived a drone strike that killed three of his relatives, but he lost both legs, one eye and his hope for the future. “I wanted to be a doctor,” he told me, “but I can’t walk to school anymore. When I see others going, I wish I could join them.”