Two major human rights groups released reports this month that together provide much-needed texture to the debate on civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes—particularly in the wake of President Obama’s May 23, 2013 speech on the future of the War on Terror. Amnesty International’s “'Will I Be Next?': US Drone Strikes in Pakistan" investigates nine drone strikes in North Waziristan between January 2012 and August 2013; Human Rights Watch’s “'Between a Drone and Al Qaeda': The Civilian Cost of US Targeted Killings in Yemen" examines six drone strikes in Yemen, one from 2009 and the remaining five from 2012 and 2013.

The two reports are based on case studies of individual strikes, and are not a broad examination of the scope and scale of civilian casualties caused by drones. Amnesty International (AI) writes in its introduction that the report is “a qualitative assessment based on detailed field research into nine of the 45 reported strikes” in North Waziristan, and that it arose out of more than sixty interviews in the region. The organization “corroborated written and oral testimony against photographic and video evidence and satellite imagery for every strike discussed in [the] report,” and in an attempt to negate the high risk of misinformation, the organization also “assembled a number of local investigative teams, which worked independently from one another, and then cross-corroborated the information they gathered, including against other sources.” AI discloses up front that it “does not have comprehensive data on the total number of US drone attacks or the numbers killed and injured, and is not in a position to endorse the findings of others”—but the report does include a rudimentary list of casualty counts from various other sources.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) took a similar approach to Amnesty International in its study of the six selected drone strikes in Yemen. The organization “interviewed more than 90 people” in the field, “reviewed dozens of videos and photos taken in the immediate aftermath of the strikes in question” and occasionally “examined remnants taken from the scene.” Like Amnesty, HRW does not purport to study a representative sample of US drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, respectively, or to come to an overall estimate of the number of civilian casualties. Both studies single out strikes in which civilians have been killed in order to draw attention to the human cost of the U.S. targeted killing policy.

As a result, the reports raise important questions of how illustrative these case studies actually are. How frequent are civilian casualties in drone strikes the US government talks about as highly surgical? How many civilian deaths are overlooked by local and international media outlets because of scarce on-the-ground reporting? These are questions on which a number of groups have gathered a lot of data. A few months ago, I summarized and compared their work on Lawfare in “A Meta-Study of Drone Strike Casualties.” This piece is an updated version of that study, which readers may find useful in light of the Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports.

An Introduction to the Debate on Civilian Casualties