Saturday, March 09, 2013

Naming the dead: five stories of drone victims...

Of more than 2,500 people so far thought to have been killed in the CIA’s Pakistan
drone campaign, we’ve identified the names of perhaps 20%. Identifying the names
of those killed can dramatically change our understanding of particular strikes,
and bring more transparency to the debate on drones. Here are a few examples.

August 2008: the teacher’s family

On the afternoon of August 30 2008, Muhammed Bahadur was praying in his local
mosque in the village of Ghundi, North Waziristan, Pakistan, when, as he told
 reporters, “the entire area was shaken by a huge blast.” A US drone had attacked a house in the village, killing six. The strike’s targets, according to a US intelligence report that was leaked later, were “two prominent al Qaeda paramilitary commanders”. At the time a local security official interviewed by AFP that the dead were “all foreign militants, including Arabs and Uzbeks”. However, local villagers claimed that some passers-by had been injured. The local security official who spoke to AFP said the wife and daughter of schoolteacher Raees Khan had become “collateral damage”, killed by flying shrapnel. Khan’s house was reportedly razed to the ground. Villagers said the other four who died were “guests”, which is sometimes a euphemism for foreigners associated with al Qaeda, but equally can mean they are simply guests. The identities of these four, their nationalities, and even whether they really were militants have never been confirmed. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. The United States has carried out more than 360 assassination drone attacks...
  2. Drone Spin: Killing machine PR swarms US mainstream...
  3. The drone ranger...
  4. Hey, hey, Barack! What do you say? How many kids have you killed today?
  5. A killer in the White House...
  6. The children killed by Obama's drones.
  7. The girl killed by Barack Obama - she never saw it coming...

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