Guardian-After drones: the indelible mark of America's remote control warfare [View all]
The Guardian | Spencer Ackerman | Thursday 21 April 2016
The strikes last a moment, but the consequences last forever. Six families explain how Obama’s secret drone war has left them struggling for answers after loved ones were wiped out without warning
Nabila’s favorite memories of her grandmother come from weddings. It didn’t matter who was getting married – relative or neighbor – her grandmother, Mamana, was an active participant, owing to her matriarchal perch above their village.
Mamana was as responsible as she was festive. An uneducated woman, she was the local midwife, and served as an impromptu primary care physician, even a veterinarian, when the need arose.
On a fall afternoon in 2012, Mamana called Nabila and a squad of her siblings and cousins outside to the family’s okra fields, part of their sprawling garden in tribal Pakistan. It was about to be the Eid festival and the Rehman family needed to gather and prepare vegetables. Nabila, nine years old, had set to work when the drone fired its missiles.
A dark plume of dust rose from the garden and mixed with acrid smoke. It spared Nabila and the other children the sight of their grandmother’s mutilated corpse.
Her older cousins, all male, ran to help the screaming children. Nabila’s hand and her arm were injured with burns and shrapnel. Her three-year-old brother, Safdar, who was watching the harvest from the roof of their home, had fallen to the ground, breaking bones in his chest and shoulders. The teenagers had gotten Nabila and some of the others out of the way when the second round of missiles hit, in what the CIA refers to as a “double-tap”, to make sure it kills its targets...snip
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/21/drone-war-obama-pakistan-cia
Barbaric. What a disgrace. Not even a protest in the US.
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