BEIJING: Campaigners and families, who lost their loved ones in controversial American covert drone missions in Pakistan, have rejected the US figures on drone strike casualties in Pakistan, the Chinese media has reported.
Shahzad Akbar, a senior lawyer, who is leading a legal battle for the civilians killed in the US drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions, says the data collected from the media reports and people on the ground put the civilian death toll at over 3,000 against 116 as claimed by the US, Xinhua news agency reported. During exclusive talks with Xinhua, Akbar mentioned a 2013 court’s judgment in the Pakistani city of Peshawar in which the judge mentioned deaths of 1,490 civilians in the US drone attacks in the Waziristan tribal region.
Akbar mentioned at least three US drone strikes that killed many civilians, including nearly 80 children in an attack on a religious school in the Bajaur tribal area in October 2006, 60 in an attack on a funeral in South Waziristan in June 2009, and 40 in a drone strike on a “Jirga” or assembly of tribal elders in North Waziristan in March 2011.
“These are just a few of the major US drone strikes which killed hundreds of civilians, including children. So I would say that the latest White House figure of up to 116 civilian casualties is ridiculous and just a political gimmick,” said Akbar, who was once denied a US visa, which stopped him from attending an International Drone Summit in Washington in 2012 where he was scheduled to speak on behalf of the family members of civilian victims of drone strikes.
He said that the US drone strike that killed Afghan Taliban Chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour in Balochistan province on May 21, scuttled diplomatic efforts to start peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
Further ambiguities remain even after the US released its “erroneous” civilian casualties figure as no details have been shared with the media about the identity of the slain people in Pakistan and other countries, and no one knows how exactly the US separate militants from the civilians.
“I think US President Barack Obama was concerned about his legacy as he signed death warrants for the extra-judicial murders of over 4,000 people. The American leader in fact uses armed drones for assassinations,” the lawyer said. Abdul Karim Khan, a native of Mirali in North Waziristan, who lost his son Zahinullah and brother Asif Iqbal, to a December 2009 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drone strike, says thousands civilians have died as a result of the covert operations.
“I strongly believe the American report on the civilian casualties is a lie, as I myself have seen hundreds of deaths of local tribesmen in just my area alone,” Khan told Xinhua.
The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which provides a full dataset of all known US drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, says the strikes have also killed more than 400 civilians. In 2015 it also started monitoring international air strikes in Afghanistan.
“There is no doubt that US drone attacks have killed civilians in Pakistan, though it appears from our monitoring that the attacks have killed far fewer in recent years compared with levels seen in 2010 and before,” Jack Serle, a reporter for the bureau, told Xinhua.
“But the trouble is far too often we do not know who has been killed by drones, so we don’t know if they’re innocent civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time, if they’re terrorists plotting attacks in Islamabad, Kabul or the West, or if they’re just drivers who had no choice but throw in their lot with some criminal gang in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA),” he said on July 5.
On July 2, Pakistan demanded an immediate cessation of drone strikes in its territory, terming them a violation of territorial integrity and sovereignty of states.
