The killing of two British citizens in a targeted drone strike in Syria marks a major departure for the UK. While killing its own citizens by missiles fired from drones is not new for the US, this is the first time such an attack has been carried out by Britain.



The attack raises an immediate issue, just as it has done in the US, over whether the killing of its citizens in such a way is lawful. It also raises a political question of whether David Cameron, in spite of a parliamentary vote against military action in Syria two years ago, is slowly creeping towards taking the UK fully into the conflict.

The prime minister, in his Commons statement, justified the attack as self-defence, to prevent terrorist outrages in the UK planned by Islamic State. He confirmed that a third Briton, Junaid Hussein, also believed to be fighting with Isis, had been killed in a drone attack by the US.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Cameron announces on Monday that the British government authorised an airstrike in Syria that killed two Britons fighting with Islamic State.

The attack that killed Britons Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin in a vehicle near Raqqa on 21 August was carried out by a Reaper drone flown from a base in the Middle East but controlled by a British crew either operating at RAF Waddington or from the US air base at Creech in Nevada. The Ministry of Defence never confirms the location.

The RAF was acting on intelligence that required a quick response, according to security sources.

The RAF has been carrying out drone strikes against targets in Iraq as part of an international coalition against Isis. These have mainly been against Isis collectively, such as suspected vehicles or groups attacking the Iraqi army or Iraqi Kurdish forces in the north.

This was different. It was against a particular individual: Khan. The attack was not aimed at Amin: it was just his misfortune he was in the vehicle with him. A third victim killed in the attack was also a member of Isis but was not British.

The US has been carrying out drone attacks against its own citizens for more than a decade, the most controversial target of which was Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida preacher, in Yemen in 2011. He was killed by a US Hellfire missile fired by a drone controlled by the CIA. Barack Obama has since faced repeated questions about the constitutionality of such killings, with accusations that the US is engaged in extrajudicial assassinations.

The UK has no such constitution protecting individual citizens. But the same questions arise. Cameron’s argument to counter these questions is that Khan was promoting attacks in the UK so the act was in self-defence. As a further elaboration, the argument runs that it is near impossible to arrest him in the Syrian battlefield and he is not likely to return voluntarily to the UK: killing him was the only option.

The political argument is over mission creep. Having no parliamentary authority to expand airstrikes to Syria, the UK was initially restricted to surveillance flights over the country. Earlier this year, there was the revelation that RAF crews embedded with the US were taking part in air strikes.

According to Chris Cole, the head of the campaign group Drone Wars, in May, RAF drones flew 40% of their missions over Syria. This was up up from 10% in January.

He said: “This was the deliberate killing of a British citizen. It is shocking. We have not seen this before.”

Michael Clarke, director-general of London’s Royal United Services Institute, said: “This announcement by the prime minister is a big departure in a number of ways.” Firstly he said that Cameron in October last year had pledged that there would be no military operations conducted in Syria.

He went on: “Secondly, this drone strike is the first to have been conducted, apparently, as a targeted assassination. The prime minister’s statement spoke of the ‘meticulous planning’ for a ‘precision airstrike’. Presumably, Reyaad Khan, who had been operating in Syria since November 2013, was the intended target.



“The point is not so much that this man was British but that he was targeted in an area that the UK does not currently regard, legally, as an operational theatre of war for UK forces.

“Drones were used for lethal strikes in Afghanistan but only where UK or Nato forces were threatened by fighters on the ground,” Clarke said. “The government insisted that, unlike CIA drones, they were never used for targeted assassinations in territories where we were not militarily engaged.”