Militants and not civilians bear brunt of drone attacks Published on Monday 27 February 2012 01:59 American drone strikes inside Pakistan are killing far fewer civilians than many in the country are led to believe, according to a rare on-the-ground investigation of ten of the deadliest attacks in the past 18 months. The widespread perception in Pakistan is that civilians, not militants, are the principal victims - a view that is fostered by leading right-wing politicians, clerics and the fighters themselves. But a reporter who spoke to about 80 villagers at the sites of the ten attacks in North Waziristan, the main sanctuary for militants in Pakistan's north-west tribal region along the Afghan border, was told that a significant majority of the dead were combatants. Indeed, he was told by the villagers that of at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 per cent were militants. The remainder were either civilians or tribal police. The US has carried out at least 280 attacks since 2004 in Pakistan's tribal region. Death tolls from the strikes usually rely on reports from Pakistani intelligence agents. Drone attacks began during the Bush administration but President Barack Obama increased them significantly when he took office. Syed Munawar Hasan, head of the country's most powerful Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, recently claimed on TV that the strikes "are killing nearly 100 per cent innocent people." Some analysts have been sceptical about carrying out on-the-ground investigations, assuming villagers would follow the militants" narrative of high civilian death tolls to avoid reprisals. But this study showed otherwise. Many knew the dead civilians personally. They also said one way to distinguish civilians from militants was by counting funerals, because the bodies of dead militants would usually be whisked away for burial elsewhere. An attack near Miran Shah before dawn on 10 August, 2011, was one of six in which villagers said no civilians died. A drone fired missiles at a large brick compound, killing at least 20 Afghan and Pakistani Taleban fighters, said Sajjad Ali, a local driver. The compound hit was known as a rest house for militants run by the Haqqani network, an Afghan group focused on fighting foreign troops in Afghanistan, he said. A strike on 14 August, 2010, on a compound in Issori Boikhel village also illustrated the danger to civilians who live close to militants. The attack killed seven Pakistani Taleban fighters and seven tribesmen, said Shera Deen, the owner of the compound that was hit. Safir Ullah, a student, corroborated the casualty count, as did a third villager. Deen, who was not in the compound when it was attacked, said he lost two sons, a brother and three nephews, one of them ten years old. According to the villagers, the Taleban fighters entered the compound to join the prayers. Regarding a 17 March, 2011, strike on Shiga village, the bloodiest known attack, US officials said the group targeted was heavily armed, some of its members connected to al-Qaeda. But villagers and Pakistani officials said the missiles hit a community meeting held to resolve a mining dispute, killing four Pakistani Taleban fighters and 38 civilians and tribal police. The militants were there because they controlled the area and any decision made would need their approval, said Gul Ahmed, a farmer. Christopher Rogers, a lawyer who has studied civilian casualties in Pakistan from drone attacks and other military action, said that regardless of casualty tolls, the US still needed to make the programme more transparent to prove it is complying with international laws. "The percentage of militants killed is an important piece of this, but it is one piece of a larger picture," said Mr Rogers. The bigger issue here is the covert nature of the programme, the complete lack of any transparency and accountability and the lack of information about how the US distinguishes a militant from a civilian.