A Man On The U.S. Drone Kill List Opened Up About Being Hunted 24/7 For The Past Four Years Of His Life

On the one hand, the United States’ drone assassination program has made impressive strides in our ability to keep America safe from afar, reducing U.S. military casualties to a near minimum while successfully hunting and eliminating people who were plotting strikes against our citizens.

On the other hand, it is an unprecedentedly illegal and immoral way of conducting war that presupposes guilt based on factors that have no bearing on matters of actual involvement in terrorist activities (like proximity) and arguably has done more do diminish our standing in the Middle East than any actual invasion.

Likely the truth is somewhere in between, but there’s no arguing that the president has a classified list of people approved to be killed by the U.S. government, and whether they live or die is solely up to him.

Malik Jalal is on that list. He’s been told by confidential sources he’s on there, and he’s also survived four drone strikes aimed at him.

He’s a member of the North Waziristan Peace Committee who, after a drone strike killed 40 civilians in his village, declared war on the U.S.

[On] 27 March 2011, an American missile targeted a Jirga, where local Maliks – all friends and associates of mine – were working to resolve a local dispute and bring peace. Some 40 civilians died that day, all innocent, and some of them fellow members of the NWPC. I was early to the scene of this horror.

Like others that day, I said some things I regret. I was angry, and I said we would get our revenge. But, in truth, how would we ever do such a thing? Our true frustration was that we – the elders of our villages – are now powerless to protect our people.

Prior to that, he’d survived three drone strikes simply for being a male in Waziristan. Which you think about it, is pretty chill of him. How many times would you willingly be shot at from the sky before wanting to fuck a fucking super power up.

I am from Waziristan, the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I am one of the leaders of the North Waziristan Peace Committee (NWPC), which is a body of local Maliks (or community leaders) that is devoted to trying to keep the peace in our region. We are sanctioned by the Pakistan government, and our main mission is to try to prevent violence between the local Taliban and the authorities.

In January 2010, I lent my vehicle to my nephew, Salimullah, to drive to Deegan for an oil change and to have one of the tires checked. Rumours had surfaced that drones were targeting particular vehicles, and tracking particular phone signals. The sky was clear and there were drones circling overhead.

As Salimullah conversed with the mechanic, a second vehicle pulled up next to mine. There were four men inside, just local chromite miners. A missile destroyed both vehicles, killed all four men, and seriously injured Salimullah, who spent the next 31 days in hospital.

That’s the point I was getting at above. Where do you draw line? You’d like to believe the U.S. would, as moral arbiter in the world, resist as much from harming civilians as possible, but the drone program (and other aerial campaigns) makes it apparent they do not. And even if you can assume everyone in every strike is guilty, you never actually know.

But now, Jalal, after having done nothing worse than basically saying “Fuck you,” after a bunch of his friends were killed, lives his life in permanent fear.

I soon began to park any vehicle far from my destination, to avoid making it a target. My friends began to decline my invitations, afraid that dinner might be interrupted by a missile.

I took to the habit of sleeping under the trees, well above my home, to avoid acting as a magnet of death for my whole family. But one night my youngest son, Hilal (then aged six), followed me out to the mountainside. He said that he, too, feared the droning engines at night. I tried to comfort him. I said that drones wouldn’t target children, but Hilal refused to believe me. He said that missiles had often killed children. It was then that I knew that I could not let them go on living like this.

This is basically the life of every male in Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, among plenty of other countries where the U.S. drone program operates with practical impunity.

Right? Wrong?

Give his whole essay a read and decide for yourself.

[Via Independent]