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.

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

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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.