GLOCAL February 2014 | Page 45

In October 2013, the Pakistani government revealed that since 2008, civilian casualties made up only 3 percent of deaths from drone strikes. Since 2008, there have been 317 drone strikes that killed 2,160 Islamic militants and 67 civilians. This is far less than previous government and independent organization calculations of collateral damage from these attacks. A statistics published by Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a U.K.based non-profit, shows below mentioned causalities. Country Pakistan Yemen Somalia Time Span 2004– 2013 2002– 2013 2007– 2013 Total Strikes 381 57-67 4-10 Total killed 2,5373,646 283412 9-30 Civilians killed 416951 27-71 0-16 Children killed 168200 5 0 Injured 1,1281,557 72180 2-24 Criticizing drone strikes Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued a pair of reports in October, 2013 fiercely criticizing the secrecy that shrouds the Obama administration's drone program, and calling for investigations into the deaths of drone victims with no apparent connection to terrorism. The drone war is under increasing scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad. A September, 2013 U.N. report warned that drone warfare has the potential to greatly undermine global stability. In October last year, for the first time, Congress heard firsthand 43 After more than 30 UAV-based strikes hit civilian homes in Afghanistan in 2012, President Hamid Karzai demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia that are not in war zones. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has criticized such use of UAVs: "We don't know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks...This would have been unthinkable in previous times." Reported Casualties Page since 2004 is approximately 32%. The study reports that 114 reported UAV-based missile strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to present killed between 830 and 1,210 individuals, around 550 to 850 of whom were militants.