Update, March 3: Nick Waters of Bellingcat has found evidence that the drone reported in this story was actually operated by the Iraqi Federal Police. Our original story below attributed the drone to IS based on an Agence France report.

On the morning of February 23, Iraqi forces moved through Al-Buseif, Iraq as they began their assault against the Islamic State (IS) held Mosul Airport. All the while, a quadcopter drone buzzed overhead. Sara Hussein, a reporter with Agence France-Presse covering the assault on Mosul, reported via Twitter that the Iraqi Army had brought down the weaponized drone, and her driver managed to take pictures of it after it was grounded.

After we moved forward, #Iraq forces shot down this weaponised IS drone that had been buzzing over us earlier. Pic credit our driver Alaa. pic.twitter.com/Pzo8E3MqJv — Sara Hussein (@sarahussein) February 23, 2017

The drone was armed with a pair of small bombs constructed from what appears to be a 40-millimeter grenade—the type fired by infantry grenade launchers. The bodies of the bombs are made of PVC pipe, and they have tails made from badminton shuttlecocks.

Another pic of the weaponised IS drone that was flying over us outside Al-Buseif this morning and was brought down by #Iraq forces pic.twitter.com/n5mW6DpJJn — Sara Hussein (@sarahussein) February 23, 2017

Anyone who's looked at buying a consumer drone would likely recognize the logo on the antenna atop the downed drone: it belongs to DJI, the Chinese company that manufactures the Phantom drone Ars' Lee Hutchinson flew (and crashed) in 2014. The model used by IS in this case, however, is the Matrice 100, an industrial drone built by DJI as a pre-built platform for drone developers and sold as part of a "Smarter Farming Kit." Priced at $3,300 for sale in the US on its own and for $8,300 as a kit, the Matrice 100 is not exactly in the price range of most military drones. But it is capable of 35 minutes of flight time per battery and has enough power to carry up to 1.2 kilograms of additional payload—as well as UART interfaces to plug in accessories like bomb release servos.

The IS has been fairly aggressive in its use of drones, particularly DJI Phantom drones equipped with single bombs loaded in improvised cup-based bomb bays. Many of them have dropped bombs with plastic tails made with a CNC milling machine, as the open source intelligence site Bellingcat reports.

Examples of 4 different types of munitions dropped by IS-operated quadcopters pic.twitter.com/1l5AHMKTZs — PurpleOlive (@PurpleOlive2) February 5, 2017

But the more expensive and capable Matrice 100 is a serious step up from some of the other drones used by other belligerents, particularly in terms of loiter time and payload. Its use indicates that IS has been rapidly advancing its improvised air force in advance of the battle for Mosul.

The arming of drones in Syria and Iraq has driven a great deal of interest in counter-drone technology, including devices like the DroneDefender and DroneBuster. These devices have been developed to jam drone communications or force them to land by jamming GPS guidance.

The Australia-based DroneShield announced this week that it had made a sale of its DroneGun to "the Ministry of Defence of a Middle Eastern country... closely allied with the Western countries." The sale, a company spokesperson claimed, was the first to a Middle Eastern customer.

DroneShield claims to have a competitive advantage over the other counter-drone technologies on the market because it doesn't rely on trying to "hack" the drone. DroneBuster, for example, uses a technology that attempts to overpower remote control protocols from the drone's operator, using known exploits in the protocols to deactivate the drone or force it to land. But DroneShield's spokesperson claimed that "such cyber solutions are specific to each individual drone make and model—and often are not effective against frequency hopper models such as DJI Phantom 4, which is one of the most popular drone models in the market today."