Category Archives: Drones (military)

Kurds call on US to block Turkish military drones from Syrian air space

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  • Unmanned weapons ‘targeting anything they wish to’
  • Kurds say Turks have killed 509 civilians and 412 troops

Syrian Kurds are asking the Pentagon to block US-controlled air space over north-eastern Syria to Turkish armed drones which they claim are causing significant civilian casualties.

Ilham Ahmed, the head of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), said the Kurds would hold the Pentagon responsible for Turkish war crimes if they did nothing to guarantee protection from the air.

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Trump says US response to oil attack depends on Saudi Arabia’s assessment

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US secretaries of state and energy both explicitly blamed Iran for the attack but Trump suggests US did not have definitive evidence

Donald Trump has said the US response to the attack on Saudi oil facilities will depend on the assessment in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and downplayed US dependence on Middle East energy supplies.

The US secretaries of state and energy both explicitly blamed Iran for the attack. Unnamed US officials were also quoted in US media outlets as saying Iranian cruise missiles were used in Saturday’s attack on an oil field and processing plant. Estimates of the number of missiles used ranged from “nearly a dozen” to “over two dozen”.

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Middle East drones signal end to era of fast jet air supremacy

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Tiny, cheap, unmanned and hard-to-detect aircraft are transforming conflicts across region

In the history of modern warfare, “own the skies, win the war” has been a constant maxim. Countries with the best technology and biggest budgets have devoted tens of billions to building modern air forces, confident they will continue to give their militaries primacy in almost any conflict.

Tiny, cheap, unmanned aircraft have changed that, especially over the battlefields of the Middle East. In the past three months alone, drones have made quite an impact in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and possibly now Saudi Arabia, where half the country’s oil production - and up to 7% of the world’s global supply – has been taken offline by a blitz that caused no air raid sirens and seems to have eluded the region’s most advanced air warning systems.

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Ex-Google worker fears ‘killer robots’ could cause mass atrocities

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Engineer who quit over military drone project warns AI might also accidentally start a war

A new generation of autonomous weapons or “killer robots” could accidentally start a war or cause mass atrocities, a former top Google software engineer has warned.

Laura Nolan, who resigned from Google last year in protest at being sent to work on a project to dramatically enhance US military drone technology, has called for all AI killing machines not operated by humans to be banned.

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Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone strikes

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Yemen’s rebel movement says it launched strikes that sparked huge fire at processing facility

Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for a drone attack on the world’s largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia which is vital to global energy supplies.

The attacks on the processor and a major oilfield, operated by Saudi Aramco, on early Saturday sparked a huge fire, the kingdom’s interior ministry said.

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Saudi Arabia: major fire at world’s largest oil refinery after drone attack – video

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Houthi drones attacked the world's largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia and a major oilfield operated by Saudi Aramco early on Saturday, sparking a huge fire at a processor vital to global energy supplies. It was not clear if there were any injuries in the attacks, nor whether they would affect the country's oil production

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Drone attacks in Middle East raise fears of escalating conflict

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Multiple attacks in region suggest drone warfare could extend to distant battlefields

A spate of drone attacks in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and now Lebanon has raised the spectre of a new era of conflict in the region, due to the ability of stealth-like weapons to penetrate distant battlefields and hit closely guarded targets.

Drone warfare has become an instrumental factor in the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran, now being fought over both sides of the Israeli border and in skies across the region.

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US military drone shot down over Yemen

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Two US officials say drone was brought down on Tuesday south-east of the capital Sana’a

A US military MQ-9 drone has been shot down in Yemen’s Dhamar governate, south-east of the Houthi-controlled capital Sana’a, two US officials have said.

A Houthi military spokesman had earlier said that air defences had brought down a US drone.

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Libya drone strike heightens fears of air war and risk of civilian deaths

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Strike in Murzuq last week, blamed on Haftar forces, killed at least 45 people

An air war in Libya is intensifying as rival forces in the divided country try to break a military stalemate, heightening significantly the risk of civilian casualties.

At least 45 people were killed and dozens wounded in an airstrike last Sunday that targeted a town hall meeting in south-western Libya. The forces of Khalifa Haftar, the 75-year-old military strongman who controls much of the east of the country, have been blamed.

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Foreign Office minister to visit Iran to call for ‘urgent de-escalation’

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Andrew Murrison will raise concerns about country’s conduct amid rising tensions

A Foreign Office minister is to visit Iran on Sunday and call for “urgent de-escalation in the region”, amid heightening tensions between Tehran and Washington after an unmanned American drone was shot down.

Andrew Murrison, the MP for South West Wiltshire who covers the Middle East as part of his brief, will raise UK and international concerns about Iran’s “regional conduct and its threat to cease complying with the nuclear deal to which the UK remains fully committed” during “frank and constructive” talks with the government in Tehran.

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Military drone crashes raise fears for civilians

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Safety warning as MoD pushes to fly the aircraft in Britain

Two military drones are crashing every month on average, according to research that raises questions about the safety of the technology, both in conflict zones and civilian environments.

Accidents Will Happen, a report published by the campaign group Drone Wars UK, reveals that there have been more than 250 crashes involving the large unmanned aircraft in the past decade. A Reaper drone has a maximum speed of 480kph, a range of 1,800km and is armed with up to four missiles and two 230kg bombs.

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The rise of the killer robots – and the two women fighting back

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Jody Williams and Mary Wareham were leading lights in the campaign to ban landmines. Now they have autonomous weapons in their sights

It sounds like something from the outer reaches of science fiction: battlefield robots waging constant war, algorithms that determine who to kill, face-recognition fighting machines that can ID a target and take it out before you have time to say “Geneva conventions”.

This is no film script, however, but an ominous picture of future warfare that is moving ever closer. “Killer robots” is shorthand for a range of tech that has generals salivating and peace campaigners terrified at the ethical ramifications of warfare waged via digital proxies.

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