Suicide drones kill civilians from Syria to Ukraine – DNyuz

On March 11, Syrian farmer Ali Ahmad Barakat drove a tractor to his fields in the fertile rebel-held areas of the Al-Ghab plain, just a few kilometers from the front line with Assadist forces. For years, the farmers of Al-Ghab had refused to let violence deter them from working in their fields.

But Barakat would become the next victim of the Syrian army’s new, terrifying weapon: a cheap, home-built suicide drone.

Attacking civilians with drones is not new, but until recently the vast majority of these attacks were carried out with expensive long- and medium-range drones specifically designed for military purposes. These characteristics meant that they could only be carried out by a small number of actors worldwide.

Armed groups such as the Islamic State began experimenting with small, cheap, off-the-shelf and custom-built drones in the 2010s. They capitalized on the rise of consumer drones, but their attacks were largely focused on military targets and objectives.

In the meantime, the picture has changed.

Small, inexpensive drones have become an indispensable tool on modern battlefields, as fighters come up with increasingly creative ways to use these tiny flying robots. Inspired by these tactics, some fighters in conflicts from Myanmar to Syria are beginning to employ drone warfare techniques recently refined in the Russia-Ukraine war, such as the use of small, ultra-fast suicide drones fashioned from cheap hobby racing kits, as well as consumer camera drones equipped to drop explosives to target, kill, and terrorize civilians.

And we don’t know how to stop them.

Since Russia first invaded Ukraine in early 2022, I have been following the critical role of small drone technology in the conflict. I hope that a better understanding of drone warfare tactics would make it easier to protect civilians from the dangers they face.

In March, the Syrian White Helmets civil defense group contacted me. According to their information (published in a recent report), more and more civilians in rebel-held frontline areas were being targeted with small suicide drones. According to a number of sources, Russian military specialists had recently begun training Syrian army troops to use both first-person-view (FPV) suicide drones and anti-drone weapons. Russian drone warfare techniques were beginning to spread.

The attacks have shocked even seasoned medics. White Helmets volunteer Ali Obied was one of the first medical workers to arrive at the scene after Barakat was killed. “When we arrived at the scene, we saw the suicide drone directly attacking the operator, killing him and dismembering him. We collected the operator’s pieces one by one,” he said. They had to quickly retreat from the scene when a spotter told them on a walkie-talkie that other drones were hovering nearby.

Another volunteer, Walid Abdeen, responded to an April 16 attack that hit several civilian cars and a public market, injuring five people. He was convinced that a suicide drone was the culprit, an observation supported by other witnesses who saw the drone in the air before impact. “When suicide drones explode, there is nothing left, only small pieces, but the sound of the drone is the same as that of drones used by journalists,” Abdeen said.

The volunteers agreed that this similarity to peaceful drones was a problem. “It’s hard for civilians to distinguish between them in the air, and suddenly they attack someone — a house, a center, a car,” said Ismail Alabdullah, a media coordinator and volunteer for the White Helmets.

“Those drones, if they want to kill someone walking to school, or even the White Helmets, if they are returning to their (medical) centers – the drones can find individuals, attack the centers, kill them directly,” Alabdullah added. “We have experience with mortars, rockets, and artillery shelling. But this new weapon is incredibly dangerous because it is so accurate and cheap to develop.”

White Helmets officials say dozens of these FPV drone strikes occur every week. Thanks to the terror spread by these relentless attacks, civilians who have been hanging around Syria’s border areas for years are finally starting to leave.

These drone-powered mechanisms for spreading mass civilian terror aren’t limited to Syria: They’re also on the rise in Ukraine. Targeted Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian civilians increased dramatically this summer. And while top UN officials condemned the surge in strikes at the Security Council in March, the onslaught shows no sign of stopping.

From July 1 to July 21 alone, I have collected 34 separate cases of alleged attacks on Ukrainian civilians by Russian drones, based on open-source information posted by official sources in the Ukrainian government. As in Syria, most of the attacks in Ukraine appear to be taking place near the front lines, where FPV racing and consumer drones can reach with relatively short range, and with the same goal: to spread terror.

On July 2, a Ukrainian woman was reportedly injured by an FPV drone while she was standing in her backyard in Berislava. Days later, on July 11, authorities reported that two female volunteers were injured after a Russian FPV drone hit a humanitarian aid post in Stanislav. Then, on July 18, the governor of Kherson Oblast reported that a 74-year-old man had been killed in a Russian drone strike in Oleksandrivka – one of several elderly civilian casualties.

Some of the strikes have targeted moving civilian vehicles, including minibuses and passenger cars, as well as several clearly marked humanitarian and medical vehicles. On January 26, Ukrainian media reported that a Russian FPV drone had attacked a marked car belonging to an aid worker working for an NGO affiliated with the UN refugee agency’s humanitarian mission, destroying the car. A journalist who was in the vehicle said it was “highly likely that the driver could see the labels on the car.”

Later, on May 29, a Russian drone strike killed a Ukrainian ambulance driver and seriously injured his wife (who was in the vehicle). Shortly thereafter, on June 8, Oleksandr Prokudin, the governor of Kherson Oblast, reported that after a series of shelling near Bilozerka, a Russian drone had attacked an ambulance that had arrived to help, injuring the driver.

The tactic has spread beyond Ukraine and Syria. In Gaza, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that Israel has increasingly used small quadcopters to attack civilians and journalists, while Palestinian sources in Rafah told AFP in June that they feared “quadcopter drones, which mercilessly attack anyone who walks.” Israel has long used consumer quadcopters and racing drones for military purposes, including to drop tear gas on protesters in Gaza in 2018 and to counter so-called fire balloons launched from Gaza during the same period.

In Myanmar, rebel groups fighting the military junta have become adept at using small, cheap consumer and custom-made drones for both intelligence gathering and strikes. In recent months, Myanmar’s junta has begun to catch up: In September and October 2023, villagers in the Sagaing region said they were repeatedly attacked by regime-owned bomb-dropping drones.

In another incident in July, the NGO Insecurity Insight reported that armed Myanmar military drones attacked a health center in the Sagaing region, killing a midwife, her two-year-old child and at least five patients associated with local insurgency forces, and wounding at least 15. The patients who were killed had reportedly been injured in an earlier military drone strike and were seeking treatment for their injuries at the time.

Mexico’s drug cartels have also become heavy users of consumer and DIY drones in recent years, both for smuggling and terrorism. Like Bashar al-Assad’s forces, the cartels appear to view these sudden, shocking drone strikes as an effective way to terrorize civilians and cede strategically valuable territory to them. In May 2023, more than 600 people were reportedly displaced from communities in the Mexican state of Guerrero due to cartels’ drone strikes, and since then, civilians have reportedly been killed and local schools have been attacked in the state.

These tactics are spreading and there is little guidance for civilians, including journalists and aid workers, on how to deal with them. Most existing texts on the subject focus on attacks by larger, more powerful, and stealthier long-range military drones.

Fortunately, there are a number of things the international community can already do today.

National and international civil defense agencies and organizations, such as the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, should come together to devise strategies on how best to protect people from small drone attacks. These groups should loudly condemn terrorist attacks and investigate possible violations of international humanitarian law, as well as sponsor the research and reporting needed to better understand the problem.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has led to the rapid development of new technologies for detecting drone radio signals in the air, new tools for electronically disabling drones, and a wide range of other basic drone defense tactics (including the revelation that you can hide from thermal sensors by throwing a yoga mat over your head). Perhaps some of these tools and tactics can be adopted for civilian use.

Finally, we need more collective clarity on the legality of small drone attacks on civilians under international humanitarian law, as well as the legality of civilian attempts to defend themselves. Currently, interpretation of the law does not account for small flying robots in combat. As I wrote in 2018 (and again in 2022) with my colleague Ossama A. Zaqqout, the presence of identical-looking small drones in the airspace during current conflicts makes it very difficult for people on the ground to determine whose drone it is.

Under the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law, combatants must distinguish themselves from civilians, but unlike manned aircraft, drones are too small to carry markings visible from the ground and cannot respond to radio controls. We need better solutions to prevent these cases of mistaken identity.

There is also uncertainty about how humanitarian law might apply to civilian efforts to anticipate and defend against drone attacks. Do civilians lose their non-combatant status if they use counterterrorism tools against small drones? Do civilians lose their protection if they monitor radio waves for the presence of armed drones and report that information to combatants, or if they post that information online in a public place?

As with so many other emerging consumer technologies, we have quickly discovered how to use drones to both help and harm humanity. But civilians are not doomed to be easy targets, as long as we have the international will to find ways to protect them.

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