African Union peacekeepers liberated towns from al Shabaab control last month, with US air support (AU UN IST PHOTO/Tobin Jones taken in 2014)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

i. Key points:

As many strikes hit Afghanistan in July (17) as in January to June combined No strikes hit Pakistan for the second calendar month this year, now 56 days without incident Number of confirmed drone strikes in Yemen in 2015 reaches 15 Unprecedented intense action as at least six strikes hit Somalia while US provides African Union peacekeepers close air support

ii. The Bureau’s numbers:

Recorded US drone strikes to date

Recorded US air and cruise missile strikes to date

* The Bureau’s estimates are based predominantly on open sources information like media reports. Sometimes it is not possible to reconcile details in different reports. This is why use ranges for our record of casualties and, in the case of Yemen and Somalia, our strike tallies.

** The US has only carried out drone strikes in Pakistan.

iii. Bureau analysis for July 2015:

As many US air strikes were reported in Afghanistan in July as in the preceding six months combined. This high intensity bombardment came as the CIA goes 56 days without carrying out a strike across the border in Pakistan.

The US continued its campaign in Yemen despite the ongoing civil war tearing the country apart. And there appears to have been a change of tactics in Somalia with six strikes targeting al Shabaab fighters about to attack African Union peacekeepers.

MONTHLY REPORT BY COUNTRY

1. Pakistan

There were no CIA strikes reported in Pakistan in July – the second calendar month of 2015 without a recorded attack after February.

With the last strike on June 6, the pause in attacks has stretched to 56 days, in stark contrast to the intensity of air attacks just across the border in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, which abuts Pakistan’s tribal areas.

While US drone attacks may be on hiatus in Pakistan, the Pakistan military has continued its offensive in the tribal areas. These operations have reportedly pushed Taliban fighters into Afghanistan, possibly leaving the drones with a paucity of targets in Pakistan and a glut in Nangarhar.

So far in 2015, the Shawal area of North Waziristan has been the focus of US air attacks. Nine of the 11 strikes reported this year have hit this mountainous, thickly wooded territory that straddles the North and South Waziristan border, and the Pakistan-Afghanistan boundary.

This terrain makes it a difficult place for the Pakistan army to operate. The military had held off going into Shawal until the first week of July. The advancing troops may have pushed Taliban fighters and their families across the border into Afghanistan, emptying a formerly target rich environment for the CIA’s drones.

2. Afghanistan

Fourteen confirmed US strikes hit the eastern province of Nangarhar last month with three more strike reported elsewhere in Afghanistan.

At least 216 people were reportedly killed in July – more than in any month since January 1.

The Bureau has managed to record casualty data on a fraction of the strikes reported in monthly aggregates by the US military. The air force has flown 153 “sorties with at least one weapon release” between January 1 and the end of June, at an average of 26 per month. However the intensity increased in June – rising to 49 sorties from 21 in May.

The increased tempo of US operations could reflect a growing concern the Afghan military is struggling to keep the resurgent Taliban at bay. Nangarhar in particular has seen considerable levels of violence, potentially a consequence of Taliban fighters fleeing Pakistan’s nearby tribal agencies, before the advancing Pakistan army.

The US military is only supposed to be carrying out counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan, leaving the counter-insurgency work to the Afghan army and police.

When the US does comment on air attacks in Afghanistan, it generally says the strike was carried out against “individuals threatening the force”. It is not clear whether this is a reference to US troops carrying out ground operations who are in need of air support – possibly the US trying to mop up fighters from the various armed terrorist groups that have fled across the border from Pakistan. Or the US could now be providing air support to beleagured Afghan security forces which are struggling to maintain stability.

Afghan forces have been calling on the US for air support. And the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence agency, said it provided the US with intelligence for a July 7 strike on a group of alleged Islamic State fighters.

A US strike on a Afghan National Army outpost on July 20 provoked outrage in the Afghan senate. Two helicopter gunships killed at least seven Afghan soldiers in Logar province. “The incident happened at a time when there were no clashes in the area and foreign troops had not been asked for help,” according to General Abdul Razziq Sapai, commander of the army brigade in the province.

3. Yemen

* All but one of these actions have taken place during Obama’s presidency. Reports of incidents in Yemen often conflate individual strikes. The range we have recorded in US drone strikes and covert operations reflects this.

Three US drone strikes hit Yemen in July, killing at least 11 people. Two strikes hit Mukalla in the eastern Hadramout province and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP’s) base of operations. The third strike hit in Abyan, Hadramout’s neighbouring province, killing four or five people in a car reportedly driving from Mukalla.

AQAP has been operating out of Mukalla since April when central government forces withdrew from the eastern province.

The US has continued drone operations in Yemen while chaos has engulfed the country. The three attacks in July took the total number of people reported killed in 2015 to 50. There have now been 15 strikes this year, two less than were recorded in all 2014.

Yemen’s civil war ground on throughout July despite attempted ceasefires as fears of a humanitarian crisis grew. The Saudi-led campaign against the Houthi militia which took over the capital last year appeared to gain momentum, with the key southern city of Aden falling to Riyadh-allied forces in the second half of the month. The Washington Post attributed the turnaround – coming after months of airstrikes failed to break the stalemate – to the arrival of Saudi-trained Yemeni fighters on the frontline.

4. Somalia

At least six US strikes hit Somalia in the space of two or three days after July 15 – an unprecedented frequency of attacks in the Bureau’s records.

One killed two or three people, according to local residents and Somali officials. The death toll from the other five strikes remains unreported. A US spokesman told the Bureau: “We are still assessing the results of the operation and will provide additional information if and when appropriate.”

The strikes appeared to signal a change in tactics from the US. Strikes reported in Somalia have historically been attempts at decapitating al Shabaab, targeting senior members of the group. However the six or more strikes in July were close air support for African Union peacekeepers, as the US spokesman explained: “Over the past week, US forces conducted a series of strikes against al Shabaab, an al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group in Somalia, in defense of Amisom [African Union Mission to Somalia] forces under imminent threat of attack.”

The Amisom troops were advancing on the town of Baardheere which they took after the glut of drone attacks, in later July. Kenyan military reportedly killed 50 in an artillery barrage shortly after the first reported US strike on July 15. There were reports that US forces were involved in the operation.

The US has reportedly moved more drones out to East Africa, according to a senior US official speaking to the LA Times. This is reflected in the greater capacity built into the US drone base in Djibouti, at Chabelley air field, in 2015.

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President Barack Obama publicly acknowledged a specific drone strike in Pakistan, an unprecedented step. He apologized for killing American Warren Weinstein and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto, two al Qaeda hostages, in a signature strike in Pakistan (Photo: White House)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

i. Key points:

Signature strikes return to Pakistan and Yemen. First confirmed civilian casualties since 2012 in Pakistan. Drone strikes persist in Yemen despite catastrophic civil war. More than 100 people killed in US air strikes in Afghanistan. Al Shabaab attacks continue in Somalia despite losing leaders in drone strikes.

ii. The Bureau’s numbers:

Recorded US drone strikes to date

Recorded US air and cruise missile strikes to date

* The Bureau’s estimates are based predominantly on information from open sources like media reports. Sometimes it is not possible to reconcile details in different reports. This is why we use ranges for our record of casualties and, in the case of Yemen and Somalia, our strike tallies.

** In Pakistan the US has only carried out drone strikes.

iii. Bureau analysis for the first half of 2015:

US drone and air strikes killed at least 207 people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen so far in 2015, according to data collected by the Bureau.

The strikes left 52 dead in June alone. Last month there were two confirmed US strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, and four in Afghanistan.

CIA drones have been striking in Pakistan at a rate of around two per month for the past two years. After an intense start to the year, with five attacks reported in January, the strikes have become more occasional with none reported in February, one in March and April, and two in May and June.

This year Yemen has sunk into a civil war. Despite this, on January 25 President Barack Obama said the crisis would not affect the US’ counter-terrorism tactics. The US punctuated this statement with drone strikes on January 26, January 31 and February 2. There was then a pause for more than two months in Yemen.

The attacks abated as the Shia Houthi militia forced the government into exile and began taking control of major cities in the west of the country. Saudi Arabia began bombing Yemen in an as-yet fruitless effort to halt the Houthi advance.

The drone strikes returned in April in response to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) exploiting the crisis and taking control of the city of Mukalla in the east of the country.

Two strikes in the past six months are of particular note. Both were signature strikes – targeted at men who had been judged as al Qaeda based on their observed patterns of behaviour rather than their actual identities.

In January, the US killed two al Qaeda hostages, an American and an Italian, in Pakistan. The attack was aimed at a building housing four unnamed targets – correctly determined to be al Qaeda fighters by their observed patterns of behaviour.

Unbeknownst to the CIA, the two hostages were being held in the same building. It took the Agency several weeks to determine it had killed the two civilians in the attack.

Another CIA drone strike, this time in Yemen, also appeared to be a signature strike. It killed AQAP’s commander, Nasser al Wuhayshi (right).

Unnamed “US officials familiar with the situation” told Bloomberg the CIA had tracked al Wuhayshi and targeted him in the attack. Other unnamed US officials, however, told the Washington Post they did not know al Wuhayshi was in the car when the drones struck.

The CIA has not commented on the strike, however the timeline of events leading to the White House declaring al Wuhayshi dead suggests this was indeed a signature strike. CNN first reported his death, citing two unnamed Yemeni officials. A US official told the broadcaster America was reviewing its intelligence to see if they had killed him. It was only after AQAP itself declared Wuhayshi dead that the US came out with its own statement.

Country Reports

1. Pakistan

The CIA’s drone campaign continued in Pakistan with two strikes killing 11-14 people in the first week of June.

Four or five people were killed in a strike on the Shawal area of North Waziristan on June 1. Five days later drones reportedly hit the Shawal again, killing 7-9 people. Tribal and security sources told The News three women were among the dead. Another unnamed official told the paper fighters had their families with them “and it is possible the drone killed women as well.” None of the people killed last month have been identified.

June also saw the one year anniversary of the beginning of the Pakistani offensive in North Waziristan. The Pakistani military began air strikes in June 2014, gradually putting ground troops into the tribal agency as the second half of the year progressed. Thousands of militants have been killed since, according to the Pakistani military information service ISPR. However it is impossible to verify these claims as the army is not allowing journalists into the area and telecoms have reportedly been disrupted in some areas. This is also affecting the flow of information relating to drone strikes.

All the CIA drone strikes so far this year have damaged or destroyed domestic buildings. And 10 of the 11 strikes have reportedly hit in the Shawal area of North Waziristan.

The Shawal is a forested area of steep valleys. This inhospitable region straddles the North-South Waziristan border, and the Afghan-Pakistan border. It has long been a stronghold for smugglers and armed groups. It is one of the last Taliban bastions to be taken by Pakistani ground forces in the military’s ongoing offensive.

The rate of strikes in Pakistan could be reaching a stable point after falling from the peak of the campaign in the second half of 2010. The first and second halves of 2013, and the second half of last year saw strike hit at a rate of around two per month.

The exception is the first half of 2014 when attacks stopped entirely for more than five months while the Pakistan government tried and ultimately failed to negotiate a peace deal with the Pakistan Taliban. Three drone strikes hit in June, after the Pakistan military had begun its now year-long military operation in North Waziristan.

Two al Qaeda hostages, American Warren Weinstein and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto, were accidentally killed in a signature in January. They were the first confirmed civilians to die since the second half of 2012. However in the intervening 25 months, the Bureau has collected reports of up to 14 civilians dying in six drone strikes.

2. Afghanistan

The Bureau has been collecting data on US air and drone strikes in Afghanistan since the start of January this year. In this period, June has been the deadliest month yet recorded.

There have been eight confirmed US attacks that have killed 50-89 people, including at least 14 civilians.

The first two confirmed US attacks, on June 5 and June 8, reportedly killed civilians. The first hit a convoy of vehicles leaving a funeral in Khost province. The attack either killed 34 insurgents who had just buried a senior Taliban commander. Or it killed 14-29 civilian members of the Kuchi tribe who had buried a tribal elder.

The US said it had attacked armed militants in Khost and that reports of civilian casualties were being investigated.

The second attack hit three days later and killed seven people. One was identified as Spargahy, a local Taliban commander. Up to six of the dead were said to be high school students who had been taken for military training. It was not clear what age they were or whether they were taken by force.

The third and fourth strikes killed 13-15 people, including up to seven named alleged Taliban insurgents. There were three US air strikes reported at the end of the month, hitting Nuristan and Paktika province. The Taliban had reportedly fought fierce battles with the Afghan army in the days before the US attacks. The Taliban briefly took control of the province’s Want Waygal district on June 26. The insurgents were pushed out of the area the same day and US air attack killed five in that district on June 27.

The final strike of the month hit on June 30 in Nangarhar province, killing between four and 14 people – all reportedly insurgents. The attack hit after Reuters revealed fighters who claimed loyalty to the Islamic State had pushed the Taliban out of six of the 21 districts in Nangarhar.

Taliban violence continued last month with an attack on the parliament in Kabul. A suicide car bomb breached the wall of the complex and shook the parliament chamber itself. Gunmen stormed the building but were killed by security forces, before they could kill or take hostage any MPs.

The first six months of the year have been particularly bloody for Afghan civilians. As of April 30, 978 civilians had been killed in the ongoing conflict, according to Mark Bowden, the UN Secretary-General’s deputy special representative in the country.

This translates as 245 people killed per month. In 2014, 308 civilians died per month. However, with violence becoming more intense in Afghanistan through May and June, it seems likely 2015 will be at least as lethal for Afghan civilians.

“[Doctors] told me that they are seeing a 50 per cent increase in the number of civilians injured this year compared to the same period last year,” Bowden added.

Fighting continues in the north of the country around the city of Kunduz. The Taliban has advanced on the city and been beaten back by the Afghan army on several occasions this year.

During the latest round of fighting, the Afghan forces reportedly called on the US for air support though none was forthcoming, according to the Washington Post.

3. Yemen

* All but one of these actions have taken place during Obama’s presidency. Reports of incidents in Yemen often conflate individual strikes. The range we have recorded in US drone strikes and covert operations reflects this.

Two confirmed drone strikes killed 7-8 people in June, almost replicating the picture in May when two attacks killed 6-8 people.

The first strike in June killed Nasser al Wuhayshi, the leader of AQAP and second in command of al Qaeda overall.

Wuhayshi had been a leading figure in al Qaeda since the 1990s when in Afghanistan he became Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary. He rose to prominence in the Yemen branch of the terrorist group in 2007 and in January 2009 publicly declared himself the leader of AQAP – an amalgamation of Al Qaeda in Yemen and Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia.

Wuhayshi had led AQAP since it was formed in 2009 out of the remnants of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia and al Qaeda in Yemen, which he led since 2007. He had been deputy leader of al Qaeda and Ayman al Zawahiri’s deputy since 2013.

The second strike killed four or five people on June 24. A vehicle was reportedly targeted on the outskirts of Mukalla, in a former army base that AQAP had taken over when they took control of the city in April.

June was the third month of an ongoing Saudi Arabian bombing campaign in Yemen. The strikes are trying to halt the advancing Houthis, a Shia militia, who drove President Abdu-Rabbo Mansour Hadi into exile in Riyadh in March.

Hadi was ensconced as president in 2011 by the US and its Gulf allies in 2012 after a popular uprising ousted his predecessor, dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. Forces loyal to Hadi and his Gulf supporters are fighting the Houthis who have allied themselves with Saleh’s militias. Militias associated with southern secessionists have taken up arms against the Houthis though are adamant this does not mean they are aligned with Hadi.

Thousands of people have been killed by the civil war and Saudi air campaign. Atrocities have been reported on all sides. Saudi Arabia and its allies are stopping aid supplies from entering the country by sea and air. Houthi forces have besieged the second city of Aden. Vital infrastructure has been destroyed, food is scare, disease rife. The UN says the country is one step from famine and 31 million people require humanitarian aid.

There have been 12 drone strikes so far in 2015, more than in any six month period since the second half of 2012 when 14 drone strikes hit the country. This frequency of attacks is surprising considering Yemen has been riven by civil conflict for most of the past six months.

The increase in the rate of attacks is in part because in April AQAP took advantage of Yemen’s crisis. Its forces swept into Mukalla, the capital of Hadramout province, establishing themselves as the new authority. Four strikes hit in April and since April 12 five of the nine drone strikes have hit Mukalla.

The US drones have not been this focused on a single town or city before now, according to the Bureau’s data. The US did focus its efforts on the Abyan governorate in the second half of 2011 and into 2012. This was in response to AQAP exploiting another period of instability in Yemen to take control of most of the area in and around the governorate, declaring it an Islamic Emirate.

While the number of strikes has been going up, the casualty rate has fallen with fewer people dying per strike in the first half of 2015 than any six month period since the first half of 2013.

The attacks in the past six months have killed a number of named, senior figures in the group. Besides Nasser al Wuhayshi, killed in a signature strike in June, the drones have killed one of AQAP’s key ideologues, Nasser al Ansi, and its chief spokesman, Mohanned Ghallab.

The attacks also killed Ibrahim al Rubaish, a senior AQAP figure, and Sheikh Harith al Nadhari, a leading ideologue who released a statement praising the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.

4. Somalia

June passed without a reported US attack on al Shabaab. However this month the group released pictures of a US surveillance drone it said crashed in May.

Crowds gather in #AlShabab HQs in Dinsor town to view possible US surveillance drone the group said crashed on May 17 pic.twitter.com/14fYHkRHy4

— Harun Maruf (@HarunMaruf) June 5, 2015

There were two confirmed drone strikes in Somalia in the past six months. In a country where such attacks are rare, this represents a high intensity of operations

The strikes continued the trend seen in both the first and second halves of 2014, targeting senior figures in al Shabaab. In March a US special forces drones killed Adnan Garaar, a senior member of al Shabaab’s Amniyatt intelligence service. He reportedly replaced Ysusuf Dheeq as head of the group’s external operations. Dheeq was killed in a drone strike in February this year.

There were two confirmed drone strikes in the second half of last year – both killed senior al Shabaab figures. The first, on September 1, killed the group’s supreme leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane.

Taking out these senior figures appears not to have blunted al Shabaab’s capacity for extreme violence. It has attacked supposedly secure buildings in the fortified government district of Mogadishu. It has assassinated MPs and senior officials.

This year the group committed its worst atrocity to date. Its gunmen murdered 148 students as they slept in their dormitories at Garissa university in northeastern Kenya.

In May, Somalia expert Matt Bryden published a report that explained how al Shabaab was still a potent, transnational terrorist threat, despite having lost leaders to the drones and territory in Somalia to African Union peacekeepers.

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A US helicopter ferrying military advisers over Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, where US aircraft killed at least 34 this month (USAF)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

i. Key points:

A Pew Research Center poll finds strong support in the US for drone strikes Three US strikes kill at least 34 in Afghanistan The US continues to bomb Yemen in the midst of a brutal civil war British drones flew 301 missions over Iraq from September to the end of March

ii. The Bureau’s numbers:

Recorded US drone strikes to date

Recorded US air and cruise missile strikes to date

* The Bureau’s estimates are based predominantly on open sources information such as media reports. Sometimes it is not possible to reconcile details in different reports. This is why use ranges for our record of casualties and, in the case of Yemen and Somalia, our strike tallies.

** The US has only carried out drone strikes in Pakistan.

iii. Bureau analysis for May 2015:

A new poll this month shows the American drone campaign continues to enjoy popular support in the US as seven strikes reportedly kill 48-56 people in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

According to the Pew Research Center poll, 58% of respondents approve of “US drone strikes to target extremists” with 35% who disapprove. Nearly half, 48%, are very concerned US drone attacks endanger the lives of innocent civilians.

The research was carried out over seven days from May 12, 19 days after President Obama told the nation drones had killed Warren Weinstein, a US civilian, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian civilian.

It is not clear how intense media coverage of the deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto, and the drone war in general, affected what respondents said. However support for drones appears to have grown slightly since Pew last polled on the matter, up from 56% in February 2013.

In fact concern about civilian casualties seems to have fallen – 53% of the 2013 poll respondents said they were very concerned drones “endanger civilian lives”. It is not a direct comparison: Pew polled fewer people in February 2013 than in May 2015, and did not poll Alaska or Hawaii.

Also in May, the British government released data on anti-Islamic State air operations showing the Royal Air Force flew 301 Reaper drone missions over Iraq between the start of UK operations against Isis last September and the end of March.

The numbers were obtained by the Drone Wars UK organisation, which showed the British Reaper drones fired 102 Hellfire missiles on 87 separate occasions.

MONTHLY REPORT BY COUNTRY

1. Pakistan

The Bureau’s complete Pakistan data set is available to download as a spreadsheet.

CIA drone strikes continued in Pakistan. The first of two strikes killed 4-7 people on May 16, ending a 34 day pause. The attack hit a domestic compound reportedly being used by the Pakistan Taliban. There were no named dead though both Pakistanis and foreigners were killed, according to anonymous Pakistani officials.

The second strike hit on May 18, hours after the Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the first attack. It released a statement repeating its “call for a cessation of such strikes,” describing them as counter-productive. The second attack reportedly killed 3-6 people, none of them identified, when it hit a domestic compound and possibly a vehicle.

The two strikes in May represent a slight increase from the solitary strikes that reportedly hit Pakistan in March and April. It is below the intense period in January when five attacks killed 26-38 people, the highest number of people killed per strike since August 2014.

Both attacks hit in the Shawal area – a forested region of steep valleys that straddles the North and South Waziristan as well as the Pakistan and Afghanistan border. Several armed groups reportedly have long established strongholds there because of its location and inhospitable terrain. Seven of the nine strikes so far this year have reportedly hit within the Shawal.

The Pakistan military was this month reportedly preparing to send troops into the Shawal, 11 months after it began its ongoing military operation in North Waziristan. The scale and progress of this push into the Shawal were unclear, Reuters reported. The area was said to be off limits to journalists with roads blocked and telephone cables cut.

2. Afghanistan

The Bureau has yet to publish its Afghanistan data in a downloadable form. The full timeline of strikes is available here.

Three confirmed US strikes killed 34 people in May – almost half the total number of people reported killed since January and the most in a single month this year, according to available reporting.

This increase in casualties came as Taliban attacks battered the Afghan army and police across the country. The insurgents continued to battle with Afghan forces around the capital of the northern Kunduz province, in Helmand in the south, and even in Kabul.

The confirmed US attacks all hit Nangarhar province and all reportedly killed named, alleged Taliban commanders.

The first killed 17 people on May 4. This was the highest reported death toll from a single strike since 18 were killed on January 3. The provincial police spokesman said: “A Taliban commander named Mullah Daoud is among the dead.”

A local resident told Afghan news service Pajhwok two strikes hit in quick succession. “Soon after the first attack, rebels came to collect bodies of their colleagues when [the rescuers] came under another attack,” he said. If true, this could demonstrate the continuation of a controversial tactic used by the CIA in Pakistan of deliberately targeting rescuers, first exposed by the Bureau in 2012.

The second confirmed US attack on May 9 killed 13 including Gul Agha, reportedly the Taliban’s shadow governor in the province. He had been put on a US government sanctions list in 2010, described as “the head of the Taliban’s financial commission and is part of a recently-created Taliban council that coordinates the collection of zakat [tithe] from Baluchistan Province, Pakistan.”

The third US attack killed four people on May 14 including Taliban commander Muslahuddin. A US military spokesman told the Bureau the US carried out the three Nangarhar strikes but said he was “not going to discuss the details of those strikes”.

Ten other air strikes that killed 37-75 people were reported in Afghanistan this month. All were described as US attacks but the Bureau has not yet been able to confirm that. The Bureau’s data provides only a part of the whole picture. The US military publishes summary data each month but will not release information on individual strikes.

The high number of confirmed and possible US attacks, and casualties, came as Taliban insurgents were reportedly fighting with Afghan forces in 10 provinces. “This is the worst fighting season in a decade,” according to analyst Attiqullah Amerkhil. “There is now fighting in every part of the country.”

3. Yemen

The Bureau’s complete Yemen data set is available to download as a spreadsheet.

* All but one of these actions have taken place during Obama’s presidency. Reports of incidents in Yemen often conflate individual strikes. The range we have recorded in US drone strikes and covert operations reflects this.

There were five reported US strikes in Yemen this month. However the Bureau has only been able to confirm three were US operations.

The first confirmed US attack killed four men on May 11 in Mukalla, the capital of the eastern province of Hadramout. The strike killed four al Qaeda members, identified as: Maamoun Hatem, Abu Anwar al Kutheiri, Mohammed Saleh al Gharabi and Mabkhout Waqash al Sayeri. Hatem (below) was reportedly among the more prominent supporters in Yemen of the Islamic State group.

تم التأكد من خبر #استشهاد_الشيخ_مأمون_حاتم ان لله وإن اليه راجعون تقبلك الله في الفردوس pic.twitter.com/FGM1DEm3pr

— حساب معطل (@tunisfallouja) May 11, 2015

The US has continued targeting al Qaeda in Yemen as a brutal civil war rages. The fighting between a complex mix of competing militias and factions halted for a five-day humanitarian ceasefire at 11pm on May 12. The second US strike killed three people in Shabwa province. It hit on May 16, the day before the ceasefire ended.

The third US attack killed 3-5 in the southern province of Shabwa on May 22. Local officials, tribal sources and security officials said US drones destroyed a vehicle in the province, killing several al Qaeda members. The two further possible US strikes all reportedly hit in Shabwa province as well.

On May 27 Saudi air strikes across the border in northern Yemen and in Sanaa killed at least 80 people, the deadliest day of bombing since the strikes began in March, according to Reuters. Forty people were reportedly killed in strikes in the Hajjah province, most of them civilians according to local sources. Forty more were reportedly killed in strikes in Sanaa a few hours later.

The months of bombing, shelling and street battles mean Yemen’s key infrastructure has been smashed. Food is in short supply, airport runways have been bombed, and a fuel shortage has stopped many water pumps from working.

“The infrastructure, health, all the other vital services people need, they’re in a state of collapse,” according to the director of operations at the UN’s Organisation for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “The ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] has been describing the situation as catastrophic and I think that is about the best word to describe the plight of the Yemeni people right now.”

The UN estimates nearly 2,000 people have died since the conflict began. There are 1,037 civilians reportedly among the dead, including 234 children and 134 women.

Also this month, three Yemeni men brought an unprecedented case against the German government in a court in Cologne. The men, relatives of two men killed in an August 2012 drone strike, “called upon the German government to accept legal and political responsibility for the US drone war in Yemen and to prohibit the use of Ramstein,” according to their lawyers.

Ramstein is a US air base in Germany which is a key hub in the network controlling US drones over Asia and the Middle East. It acts as a relay station, sending information it receives in real time via undersea cables from the US, directly to satellites and on to the drones. Their first attempt was defeated, however the men were given leave to appeal the decision.

4. Somalia

The Bureau’s complete Somalia data set is available to download as a spreadsheet.

There were no reported US strikes in Somalia for the second month running. However an al Shabaab commander died of natural causes this month having at least twice survived US attacks.

Ethiopian Hasan al Turki, 73, died after a long illness, al Shabaab reported. He met Osama Bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan and in Sudan, al Shabaab’s spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rageh said.

Al Turki (below) was added to the US Treasury Department al Qaeda sanctions list in 2001 and the UN Security Council’s al Qaeda list in 2004.

Sheikh Hassan Al-Turki was ex-military colonel in the army, ex-Al-Itihad and co-founder of Raskamboni & Hisbul Islam. pic.twitter.com/fuTN22lThR — Harun Maruf (@HarunMaruf) May 28, 2015

On January 23 2007 the US killed eight people, possibly including civilians, in an AC-130 gunship attack. It was meant to kill al Turki, then a deputy leader of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), as well as Ahmed Madobe a fellow ICU leader. The US reportedly missed al Turki again on March 3 2008 with a cruise missile fired from a US warship. Al Turki was then leader of the Ras Kamboni Brigades, an Islamist insurgent group in southern Somalia that merged with al Shabaab in 2010.

Also this month, al Shabaab continued to demonstrate it is a dangerous enemy for both the Somali and Kenyan governments.

John Kerry was the first US secretary of state to visit Somalia on May 5. He spent three hours in the highly fortified diplomatic enclave near Mogadishu’s airport before flying back into Kenya. The next day Abdifatah Barre, the deputy district commissioner of Mogadishu’s Wadajir district, was murdered by al Shabaab on the streets of the capital.

On May 23 fighting between al Shabaab and government forces reportedly left at least 24 people dead in southern Somalia. Four people were also shot dead in Mogadishu by al Shabaab, including a parliamentarian.

In Kenya, al Shabaab took control of a village on May 21 for several hours. The group forced the villagers to the mosque where they preached at them for two hours before leaving. It attacked a second village the next day, also in Garissa Count. Al Shabaab said it took control of Yumbis village for eight hours though the Kenyan interior ministry claimed its forces had successfully repelled the attack. A local resident told al Jazeera masked al Shabaab fighters had planted their black flag throughout the village.

The following week al Shabaab gunmen attacked two police patrols in Garissa, triggering a gun battle that the armed group claimed left 25 Kenyans dead. The police said one of its men had been killed. The instability in Garissa forced Medecin Sans Frontier (MSF) to evacuate a third of its staff from Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp. It sits near the Somali border and is home to thousands of ethnic Somalis. MSF said it was forced to close two of its four health posts there and suspend its ante-natal work entirely.

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Spanish citizen Raquel Burgos Garcia died in a CIA drone strike in Pakistan in 2005. (AP Photo/Nicolas Asfouri)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

i. Key points:

Drones have killed 38 Westerners since 2002 including two al Qaeda hostages killed in January. US air strikes continue in Afghanistan but the vacuum of information remains. Most drone strikes in Yemen in a month since November 2014 despite ongoing crisis.

ii. The Bureau’s numbers:

Recorded US drone strikes to date

Recorded US air and cruise missile strikes to date

* The Bureau’s estimates are based predominantly on open sources of  information like media reports. Sometimes it is not possible to reconcile details in different reports. This is why use ranges for our record of casualties and, in the cases of Yemen and Somalia, our strike tallies.

** The US has only carried out drone strikes in Pakistan.

iii. Bureau analysis for April 2015:

Despite the world’s attention been focused on the CIA’s drone programme in Pakistan, after President Obama officially apologised for killing two al Qaeda hostages including an American and an Italian in a drone strike in January, there has been very little activity in the covert war in Pakistan this month. Just one strike hit the country in April, the first for 25 days.

Strikes continue in Afghanistan. However there remains a considerable deficit between the number of strikes taking place according to aggregated figures produced by the US and the number of attacks reported in the media. US air and ground forces have had to come to the aid of the Afghan army and police as the Taliban has ramped up its attacks in the summer fighting season.

In Yemen Saudi jets and ships continued to pound cities and towns, as the country collapsed into chaos. More than 1,200 people have been killed already, according to the UN. Among this carnage, the US has carried out four drone strikes – this is more than any month since November 2014.

Once again there were no US strikes reported in Somalia. However, a massacre committed by al Shabaab in eastern Kenya spurred the Kenyan air force to strike southern Somalia. Al Shabaab murdered 147 students in Garissa university – Nairobi swiftly struck back and claimed to have killed hundreds of al Shabaab fighters.

MONTHLY REPORT BY COUNTRY

1. Pakistan

The Bureau’s complete Pakistan data set is available to download as a spreadsheet.

An Italian and three US citizens were killed in two drone strikes in January, it emerged this month.

As the Bureau revealed this month, the four deaths mean 38 Westerners have been reported killed in the US covert drone war since 2002 – 30 of them in Pakistan.

Giovanni Lo Porto and Warren Weinstein were both aid workers taken hostage by al Qaeda in 2012 and 2011 respectively. They were killed along with Ahmed Farouq, an American member of al Qaeda, in a January 15 strike according to Bureau analysis. Adam Gadahn, an American al Qaeda propagandist, was killed in a subsequent strike on January 19 or 28.

President Barack Obama acknowledged Lo Porto and Weinstein had been killed in a US drone strike. Apologising for the mistake, he promised an investigation into the attack that killed them.

The death of the hostages reignited two debates: whether the CIA should be carrying out the strikes and whether the current system of oversight was sufficient to ensure the campaign was prosecuted properly.

Eleven days before the announcement the CIA reportedly killed four people in the first drone strike in 25 days. There were limited details about who was killed though they reportedly belonged to a faction of the Pakistan Taliban.

The attack hit in the Shawl area, a region of steep valleys and thick woods that straddles the borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as South and north Waziristan. It has long been a stronghold for various armed groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Five of the seven strikes in Pakistan this year have hit in the Shawal.

Also this month, the former Islamabad station chief has been appointed as a deputy chief of counter-intelligence at the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center – the entity that runs the CIA’s drone programme. Jonathan Bank, 47, had to flee Pakistan in 2010 after being named in a court case brought by the relatives of drone strike victims.

That same case has continued in Pakistan and this month the police in Islamabad transferred responsibility for the criminal investigation to the jurisdiction of the Fata Secretariat – the bureaucratic body that runs Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

2. Afghanistan

The Bureau has yet to publish its Afghanistan data in a downloadable form. The full timeline of strikes is available here.

Strikes continue in Afghanistan with three attacks reported separately by two named senior provincial police officers.

One of the three strikes, on April 17, was reported by a single media source that the Bureau has shown in the past to be unreliable. It is included in the timeline of strikes but awaits further investigation before being included in the casualty estimates or struck out altogether.

It continues to be a struggle to obtain information on individual strikes in Afghanistan. The three attacks recorded by the Bureau are a fraction of the air sorties believed to be hitting Taliban targets. The New York Times reported the US “is regularly conducting airstrikes against low-level insurgent forces and sending Special Operations troops directly into harms way”.

The winter snows have receded and Afghanistan’s so-called “fighting season” has started. Violence peaked last year in Afghanistan as the Nato coalition withdrew from the front line, leaving the Afghan army and police to tackle a resurgent Taliban.

The fighting in 2014 was particularly fierce in part because, without western air support, the insurgents were able to collect in greater numbers and carry out prolonged attacks on army and police positions. The ensuing firefights, involving allegedly indiscriminate use of explosive weapons like mortars, took their toll especially on the civilian population caught in the middle.

The Taliban has hit the northern province of Kunduz especially hard this year. Protracted attacks in and around the provincial capital have left the Afghan army scrambling. A counter-offensive reportedly involved considerable air support with jets from “the US-led coalition,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

3. Yemen

The Bureau’s complete Yemen data set is available to download as a spreadsheet.

* All but one of these actions have taken place during Obama’s presidency. Reports of incidents in Yemen often conflate individual strikes. The range we have recorded in US drone strikes and covert operations reflects this.

Four US drone strikes hit alleged al Qaeda targets in eastern Yemen in April while the Saudi air force hammered towns and cities in the western half of the country.

This is the most confirmed drone strikes in a month since November 2014. At least 13 people were killed – the highest death toll in a month since two drone strikes killed 20 people in December 2014.

At least three of the strikes appear to have been carried out by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, according to the Washington Post.

The attacks were focused in the eastern provinces of Hadramout and Shabwah. Two of the strikes hit in Mukalla, Hadramout’s capital. The first killed Ibrahim al Rubaish, a leading propagandist and preacher within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The other killed Muhannad Ghallab, AQAP’s 35 year old Egyptian spokesman. He was killed when drones targeted a group of men sat on the Corniche by the waterfront in Mukalla at about 1am on April 22. He had become a widely quoted, anonymous AQAP source in several Western media outlets – including the Bureau.

The other two strikes targeted vehicles in Shabwa, killing 5-8 people as they drove through the area at night.

The US has continued its strikes against al Qaeda while Yemen is caught in the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe. Various militias battle it out on the ground while Saudi air strikes and naval bombardments continue. The strikes have hammered the second city of Aden where Houthi snipers and tanks have reportedly targeted civilians as well as combatants.

Al-Qatee’, a 500 years old neighborhood. What once was a historical icon of the city of #Aden is now no more. @UNESCO pic.twitter.com/7JOI3GWvSF

— Aden Relief (@AdenRelief) April 29, 2015

The World Health Organisation estimates between March 19 and April 27 the violence had “claimed 1,244 lives and left 5,044 others injured, according to health facility-based reports”.

According to the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), all but two Yemeni governorates are “conflict affected”, as of April 25. Violence has disrupted health services at two major hospitals. Food, drinking water,essential medical supplies and fuel are scarce. An ongoing air and sea blockade by the Saudi-led coalition, ostensibly an effort to prevent weapons and fighters entering the country, are being blamed for the shortages. The International Committee of the Red Cross says Yemen’s health system is struggling to cope and that “import restrictions have made the situation worse”.

The situation in Aden appears to be especially dire. Swathes of the city have been destroyed by fire and explosive ordinance. The European Council on Foreign Relations’ Adam Baron tweeted on April 28: “As fighting continues, whole neighborhoods in Aden… have effectively run out of food and water. Unfathomably horrific.”

4. Somalia

The Bureau’s complete Somalia data set is available to download as a spreadsheet.

There were no reported US drone strikes in Somalia this month. However al Shabaab brutally demonstrated it remains a potent threat to Somalia and its neighbour Kenya.

At 5.30am on April 2, al Shabaab gunmen stormed university dormitories in the eastern Kenyan city of Garissa. As many as 500 people were reportedly trapped in the building while the masked terrorists went room to room murdering the terrified students. In all 147 people died in the atrocity.

The attack raised questions of the Kenyan security services. Nairobi was accused of ignoring warnings from foreign governments of evidence of an impending attack and had told their citizens to avoid Garissa in the preceding week.

The Kenyan police and paramilitary forces appeared ill prepared to respond to the attack. Elite counter-terrorism units were first stuck in traffic on their way to an airport to fly to the scene. Then some of the team had to travel to Garissa by road as there was not enough space on the fixed-wing planes to carry the troops and their equipment. The siege eventually took 12 hours to resolve.

Nairobi responded to the university attack by swiftly bombing several al Shabaab camps in southern Somalia. The Kenyan Defence Forces claimed they destroyed each base, killing hundreds of fighters – an unlikely outcome, according to the Jamestown Foundation, considering only 10 jets were employed and conditions were cloudy.

Al Shabaab remains a threat within Somalia as well, assassinating “two city council officials, a former parliamentarian and a senior prison officer in Mogadishu” this month.

Follow our drones team Jack Serle and Abigail Fielding-Smith on Twitter.

Sign up for monthly updates from the Bureau’s Covert War project, subscribe to our podcast Drone News, and follow Drone Reads on Twitter to see what our team is reading.