The U.S. and Israel Aren’t the Only Countries Killing People With Drones

British Prime Minister David Cameron’s disclosure that his military used a drone to kill two British jihadis in Syria puts the United Kingdom into an exclusive but growing club of nations that acknowledge using unmanned aircraft to target their own citizens. 

Speaking to his Parliament on Monday, Cameron said an armed drone had targeted Reyaad Khan and had also killed Ruhul Amin, both British citizens, and had killed a third Islamic State militant who was with them at the time of the August strike. The same day, Islamabad announced that a Pakistani drone strike killed three militants near the Afghan border.

Although the United States has launched more than 400 drone strikes against militants in Pakistan since 2004, Monday’s announcement marked the first time the Pakistani government has admitted to carrying out a lethal strike with its own drone. The military’s spokesman, Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, described the dead men as “high-profile terrorists” but offered few other details.

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Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said countries like Pakistan that face ongoing threats from extremists threatening to overrun the central government see drones as “just another tool for them to use in that campaign [against militants].”

“There’s a stigma around drones, but the drones are just a tool of warfare,” he told Foreign Policy.

Joscelyn said the U.K.’s flow of foreign fighters made the use of drones to target individuals in Syria almost inevitable. Most foreign fighters, he told FP, will get wrapped up in combat on the ground and not pose a serious threat to the country they left.

But others, like the two killed by the British strike “painted targets on their own backs because of what they were doing.” One of them, he said, was using social media to encourage attacks in the U.K. “He’s basically at that point asking for authorities to do something to try and get him,” Joscelyn said.

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