U.S. Reaper drones at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan. One is armed with two 500-lb bombs. Source: GlobalPost
Malik Jalal, The Independent: I am on the Kill List. This is what it feels like to be hunted by drones
Friends decline my invitations and I have taken to sleeping outside under the trees, to avoid becoming a magnet of death for my family.
I am in the strange position of knowing that I am on the ‘Kill List’. I know this because I have been told, and I know because I have been targeted for death over and over again. Four times missiles have been fired at me. I am extraordinarily fortunate to be alive.
I don’t want to end up a “Bugsplat” – the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone. More importantly, I don’t want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized.
I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead. I’ll tell my story so that you can judge for yourselves whether I am the kind of person you want to be murdered.
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WNU Editor: Like most of these stories .... I cannot help but feel that we only know a part of the story. Is Malik Jalal a terrorist ... I do not know. But he is either incredibly lucky for not being dead yet .... or unlucky because he is innocent. Either way my advice to him would be to stay away from Pakistan .... the people around him in that part of the world have a habit of getting killed.
1 comment:
We know from leaks that SIGINT was used to put a cell phone's Pakistani owner on a kill list, because the tracking information, "matched" the theoretical patterns that a Taliban Courier might have.
It was only when the drone was en route, that somebody bothered to google the name of the cellphone owner, and discovered it was an award winning Asia Times reporter, known for his interviews with leading Talibs.
That Peace Commitee's would be on the target list should come a no surprise, the last thing the US wants is peace, and in the past, MSF, al Jazeera, even a Chinese Embassy has been on the kill lists.
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