The Chenagai Madrassa Incident

On 30 October 2006, an Islamic school in Pakistan was targeted in a missile strike that killed up to 81 people, most of whom were reportedly children, some as young as seven.

At the time of the strike, which took place in the town of Chenagai in the tribal area of Bajaur, Pakistan's military claimed responsibility, saying it had targeted the school — known as a madrassa — because it was being used as a terrorist training facility. However, an anonymous former Pakistan official, described as an ex-"key aide" to then-President Pervez Musharraf, later reportedly claimed that the attack had been carried out by a US drone, according to the Sunday Times. The US denied any role, saying it was "completely done by the Pakistani military."

Now, a newly published report has raised fresh questions about exactly who was behind this horrific incident. A leaked Pakistan government document, published by London's Bureau of Investigative Journalism on Monday, lists the Bajaur case among a series of US Predator drone strikes and NATO-backed attacks in Pakistan between 2006 and 2009. The Bureau says that the document shows the attack was the result of "a single drone strike," though the document does not specify whether a drone or other aircraft was involved.

So who carried out this controversial attack?

At the time of the strike, Pakistan's army spokesman said that it had been carried out by Pakistan military helicopter gunships that fired four or five missiles into the madrassa. One local villager told the BBC he had "heard helicopters flying in and then heard bombs." An NBC news correspondent, who was reportedly about a mile away from the madrassa at the time of the incident, said that it "was dark and very early in the morning when the blast occurred. And then I heard helicopters over the village of Chenagai where the madrassa school is located."

Analysts speculated that Pakistan's military may have not had the skills required to conduct the helicopter strike, because it was apparently conducted at 5am while it was still dark and had the hallmarks of an elite operation. Hours after the attack, Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal suggested that a US special operations team may have been behind it. "Look for signs of Task Force 145 having carried out this raid," Roggio wrote, "with unmanned Predators firing Hellfire missiles, and possibly C-130 and helicopters following up."

Others had an alternative theory. On October 31, 2006, Syed Saleem Shahzad at the Asia Times wrote:

Recently, Islamabad agreed with NATO that it could conduct operations in Pakistan from across the border in Afghanistan... Significantly, Pakistan and Taliban authorities struck a peace deal in Bajour only two days ago and were scheduled to sign a document to that effect on Monday. This lends credence to the possibility that it was NATO and not Pakistani forces that made the raid.

Among those who died in the attack was the leader of the madrassa, a reportedly pro-Taliban radical cleric named Maulana Liaqat. Pakistan officials also claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri — who was then Osama bin Laden's deputy — had used the madrassa to train suicide bombers. That would certainly have given both US and NATO forces a motive to want to target the building. And Pakistan has covered up for US drone strikes in the past.

But still, there is still no concrete information that has been presented confirming beyond doubt that a US drone or any other US or NATO military aircraft was involved.

Indeed, secret US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010, four years after the strike, did not hint at any US or NATO role. US officials writing in classified cables dated from 2006 described the incident alternately as a "Pakistan military strike against a madrassa/militant training camp" and a "Pak-Mil attack on an extremist madrassa."

Even with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's publication of the leaked Pakistani document attributing the attack to NATO forces or a US drone, in my view, the facts remain murky and contentious. And that is perhaps one of the most shocking elements of this story — that seven years on there is still such a lack of clarity about the circumstances of this grave incident, involving the reported deaths of dozens of innocent children.

Without an answer to such a simple question — who pulled the trigger? — there can be no accountability, no closure, no recourse for justice for the families of those who lost a child on that day in Chenagai. It is an incident that seems to symbolise the bloody, faceless brutality of the ruthless covert warfare that has become a staple feature of the so-called War on Terror over the past decade, especially in the tribal regions of Pakistan. But just because there may be dangerous, high-level terror targets operating in these places, military forces, wherever they are from, should not get a pass to kill and maim with impunity. For that reason alone, the madrassa strike surely requires serious further scrutiny — perhaps from UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson, who is currently investigating the issue of civilian drone deaths.

Yemen: Drones, Death And Secrecy

There have been a flurry of drone missile strikes conducted by the United States in Yemen over the the last week. Attacks on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday resulted in up to 18 fatalities, according to London's Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The attack on Wednesday in particular caught my eye. It was reported that a vehicle was targeted while travelling on an inner city road in Hadramawt, eastern Yemen, killing five "suspected militants," the country's military officials said.

However, Yemen's press were quick to report that among the dead were two civilians. One was a mosque caretaker and imam named Salim Ahmad Jaber, the other a police officer, Walid Abdullah bin Ali Jaber, according to details posted online by Yemini lawyer Haykal Bafana. Bafana wrote that the car was targeted as it was driving between houses, and the caretaker and policeman were in a house that was hit. Reuters reported local residents saying that "the car was struck by one of three missiles fired from a plane ... charred bodies were pulled from it afterwards." Pictures published by Yemeni news outlet Dammon purported to depict children playing in the mangled, burnt out and blackened remains of the car, a Suzuki Vitara.

This strike stands out as an acute example of why drone attacks can be deeply problematic. In the immediate aftermath of Wednesday's attack it was widely reported that a number of suspected militants had been obliterated in a new drone strike. Yet it later transpired that among the "suspected militants" there may have been two civilians. The concern is that, seemingly by default, unnamed "military sources" have a tendency to promptly announce that "suspected insurgents" or "militants" were the victims in any given strike - but how can we know for sure? We can't, as Wednesday's incident illustrates, and that's why scepticism about claims made by anonymous military sources is always necessary.

As is so often the case with drone strikes, it is almost impossible to confirm details for a number of reasons. 1) The bodies end up badly burnt and damaged, meaning identities of victims are hard to quickly establish; 2) the strikes can occur in dangerous and remote locations, in places where news outlets have a limited presence and facts are not forthcoming; and 3) the perpetrators of drone strikes in Yemen, the US CIA, conduct their actions and pick their targets behind a cloak of secrecy. (NB: Even the UK's Ministry of Defence has acknowledged there are "immense difficulty and risks" involved in verifying who has been hit in drone strikes. The MoD says it cannot tell exactly how many how many alleged insurgents it has killed using drones in Afghanistan.)

So the situation in Yemen is as follows: US forces are covertly bombing people in a country where no formal war has been declared. We do not know (with any certainty) who they are bombing or the justification for each bombing. We do not know exactly how many civilians have been killed in the process (the BFIJ estimates it could be up to 151), or how the pilots who remotely fly the drones from thousands of miles away are held accountable for their sometimes catastrophic errors. This can also be said in other countries that are being subjected the America's covert drone attacks, such as Pakistan and Somalia.

Drone attacks of this kind self-evidently raise profound legal, moral and ethical questions. Unfortunately, the US government presently appears to have very little interest in addressing them.

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Incidentally, I put up a short post here the other day about the psychological impact drone strikes conducted by the United States are apparently having on residents of Manzer Khel, a tribal village in North Waziristan, Pakistan. The same can be said of certain communities within Yemen. As a sheikh from Bayhan district in Shabwaare told the Economist in a piece out today: "People are afraid to go to weddings because, whenever large groups of men gather, they are afraid a drone will hit them." And Yemeni news outlet Dammon reported that prior to Wednesday's attack targeting the car in Hadramawt, US drones were spotted, instilling "panic among the citizens of the region."

There could well be blowback. While the strikes are intended to take out terror suspects, by spreading fear among villages and in some cases killing civilians, they may only be serving to recruit greater numbers of terrorists to fight and plot against America and its allies. As the Yemeni lawyer Haykal Bafana wrote on Twitter back in May: "Dear Obama, when a US drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda."

UPDATE 4.09.12: CNN is reporting that a fresh suspected US drone strike in Yemen has killed 13 civilians, including three women. A senior Yemeni Defense Ministry official is quoted as saying the target was "completely missed. It was a mistake". CNN says that families of the victims closed main roads and vowed to retaliate. Nasr Abdullah, an activist from the district where the attack took place, in the al-Baitha province, told CNN: "I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of al Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake."