Afghan Insurgents Use Drones in Fight Against U.S.
Something that’s already happening on the battlefields in Iraq and Syria.
NATO no longer has a monopoly on drones on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Because now insurgents are using them.
The drones are small, commercial-use and cheap. But they’re effective. With eyes in the sky, insurgents can conduct spy on coalition forces and target them in mortar attacks with real-time live feeds of the battlefield. In October, the Taliban even used a drone to record a suicide bombing attack for propaganda purposes.
But what’s more worrying is the possibility of insurgents arming drones with bombs — and it’s already happening in Iraq and Syria. Numerous videos of militant group purportedly dropping explosives from jerry-rigged drones have already populated YouTube (see here and here). And in October, the Islamic State attacked French and Kurdish forces in Northern Iraq with an exploding drone that killed two Kurdish soldiers.
The Pentagon is scrambling to deploy counter-drone technology to troops to respond to the threat. In October last year, Lt. Gen. Michael Shields, the director of the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Threat-Defeat Organization (JIDO) said at a media event his organization would test state-of-the-art tools to rebuff drones in January or February.
Still, Salvin said NATO wasn’t losing any sleep over the drone threat in Afghanistan yet. “It’s something we watch for, [but] we believe their use will have very little impact to our operations,” he said.