Drone strikes by the United States in Afghanistan over a recent five-month period killed civilians almost exclusively, new leaked intelligence documents suggest.
The classified information passed to the investigative journalism website The Intercept included pages from a 2013 Pentagon study of the drone task force’s work. It suggests that similar operations against suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, where intelligence was even more unreliable than in Afghanistan, had also claimed a much larger number of innocent lives than the US authorities had admitted to.
The cache of documents expose the workings of the secretive and highly controversial drone programme, which President Obama has greatly expanded despite heavy criticism.
It shows how “poor and limited” signals intelligence is used to compile hit lists and describes how analysts create portraits of potential targets and the threats they pose on so-called baseball cards, which are then sent on for approval by higher authorities. The strikes that follow often kill more people than intended and the victims are typically not the people that the Americans were aiming at.
Documents reviewing a mission called Operation Haymaker showed that US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people in northern Afghanistan between January 2012 and February 2013. Only 35 were intended targets.
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In one five-month period of the operation, nearly 90 per cent of the casualties of drone strikes were not the intended targets. The documents assert that accidental civilian victims are routinely labelled as “enemies killed in action”, even if there is no evidence to support that description.
The unknown whistleblower who provided the documents is “a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programmes described in the slides”, according to the website, which was co-founded by Glen Greenwald, the activist and journalist who helped Edward Snowden to leak data that revealed the scale of British and US surveillance programmes.
The source said the public had a right to know about the “assassination” programme conducted in their name.
Amnesty International urged Congress to launch an immediate independent inquiry into the drone-strike programme.