Report says out of 200 killed in Afghan, only 35 were targets
President Barack Obama answers a question during a joint news conference with South Korean President Park Geun-hye in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (Photo: AP)
Washington: The US President Barack Obama’s administration has underrepresented the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes, a news site said on Friday in citing a cache of secret files it published.
The news site The Intercept unveiled documents leaked by a whistle blower about America’s use of drones against terror targets in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Since taking office in 2009, Obama has vastly expanded the drone programme, authorising many more strikes than his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. The US military describes fatalities from these strikes as “enemy killed in action,” even if their identity is unknown or they were not the intended targets, The Intercept said.
And the strikes often kill many more people than intended, which runs counter to the White House and Pentagon claims that the strikes are precise and result in minimal casualties, it said.
Documents detailing a mission called Operation Haymaker showed that US special operations air strikes killed more than 200 people in northeastern Afghanistan from January 2012 to February 2013. But only 35 of those casualties were intended targets. And in one five-month period of the operation, nearly 90 per cent of those killed in air strikes were not the intended targets, The Intercept reported.
The US has better intelligence in Afghanistan — America’s longest war — than in places like Yemen and Somalia, where the ratios may be equivalent or even worse, it said.
The Intercept said the leaked documents came from a source it did not identify who works in the intelligence community. The Unied States is minimising the number of civilian casualties from drone strikes were “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies,” the source said.
( Source : AFP )
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