Killer US drones pursuing pirates off the Horn

The Obama administration is escalating US military involvement in East Africa, with pilotless aircraft known as MQ-9 Reaper drones tracking suspected pirate ships in the Indian Ocean.

Officials of the US Africa Command (Africom) say the drones could also be used to hunt and attack Islamist militants inside Somalia.

But while the Reapers are capable of firing guided missiles and bombs, they have not yet been equipped with such weapons, Africom officials say.

A less powerful type of drone, known as the MQ-1 Predator, has repeatedly launched Hellfire missiles at targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the past three years.

And these attacks have become more frequent since President Obama took office last January, according to a recent study by the New America Foundation.

In less than 10 months, the Obama administration has carried out 41 drone strikes in Pakistan, compared with 34 for all of President Bush’s final full year in office, the think tank reports.

It estimates that civilians account for about 300 of the roughly 1,000 people killed in Pakistan as a result of drone attacks since 2006.

That death toll has drawn criticism from the United Nations’ special investigator of extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions.

Phillip Alston, who has investigated the post-election violence in Kenya as part of his UN mandate, warned last month in a report to the UN General Assembly’s human rights committee that the US drone strikes may be violating international law.

Mr Alston warned that if the Obama administration continues its policy of declining to explain its drone-targeting measures, “You have the really problematic bottom line — that is that the Central Intelligence Agency is running a programme which is killing significant numbers of people, and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.”

At the same time, however, the Obama administration appears to be taking precautions to avoid civilian casualties when it conducts air raids on Islamist militants inside Somalia.

US forces relied on weapons fired from helicopters in a mid-September attack in southern Somalia that killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, an al Qa’ida fugitive linked to the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as well as to the 2002 attack on Paradise Hotel near Mombasa.

American military sources said the operation that killed Nabhan was carried out on a desert road with no civilians nearby.

The Bush administration, by contrast, had used remotely fired cruise missiles to hit targets in Somalia on at least five occasions.

Several civilians were reportedly killed in some of these strikes, stoking anti-American fury on the part of many Somalis.