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The owner of a small toy store in al-Mansur, a Baghdad neighborhood five kilometers from the Green Zone, Abu Abdullah sells a variety of remote-control vehicles. Some of his recent customers have been Iraq’s notorious Shia militiamen, eager to purchase the handful of hobbyist drones available. “They’ve come here to buy drones before, Abu Abdullah tells WIRED. “I don’t know why. Those drones aren’t particularly effective or useful. They’re toys.”
When Isis overran Mosul and Tikrit two years ago, Iraqis who had lost faith in their military rallied behind the Iranian-backed Shia militias. Lacking the advanced technology available to the American-led coalition and the Iraqi government, many militias have resorted to consumer drones to help with intelligence gathering.
While toys to some, the drones are playing a crucial role in the conflict according to Sadiq al-Husseini, a commander in the Badr Organisation – the largest and oldest of Iraq’s Shia militias. “The drones have been extremely useful for preventing casualties among our forces,” says al-Husseini while observing the front lines around Fallujah, a former Isis stronghold. “They have helped us lock onto targets with our mortars and cut Isis’s supply lines.”
Badr and other Shia militias provided fire support to the Iraqi Security Forces, namely the Federal Police, the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service, as they retook and secured Fallujah. Several militiamen explained that the drones assisted their artillery batteries in shelling Isis bases deep inside the city without hitting civilians, whom Isis had used as human shields. Considering the militias’ reputations for war crimes, their bombardment of Fallujah remains controversial.
Even the army and police, both of whom receive equipment and other support from Western countries, have relied on hobbyist drones for similar purposes. The website of Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, another Shia militia, shows an Iraqi soldier deploying a DJI Phantom drone.
On a trip to the front lines in Fallujah organised by Badr, WIRED observes a contractor for the Ministry of Interior deploying a small drone from the rooftop of a three-story building to reconnoiter and surveil Isis positions deep in the city.
According to the contractor, Hussam al-Mayali, the drones’ batteries only last forty minutes before the operators have to recharge them, so there are always spares on hand for longer missions – al-Mayali’s deployment lasted ten minutes. The Ministry of Interior started with three such drones in Fallujah, but Isis destroyed one and the American-led coalition — likely by accident — hit another. “These drones allow us to watch Isis positions and call in artillery strikes on precise locations,” says al-Mayali.
“Our artillery observers have brought our accuracy from 70 per cent to 95 per cent,” explains Karam Hatam, a policeman manning a truck-mounted rocket launcher in the rear. Two rockets from the police’s artillery batteries had hit Fallujah during al-Mayali’s deployment of the drone.
“We use the drones to provide oversight of the battlefield as our soldiers advanced against Isis,” says brigadier Haydar al-Kaabi, a commander from the Ministry of Interior. “Our logisticians buy them at the markets in Baghdad, where the militiamen purchase them like all other Iraqis.”
Al-Husseini refused to describe how and where the Shia militias acquired the drones, only saying that the prime minister’s office obtained them on the militias’ behalf. Since 2014, all the Shia militias have reported to the prime minister’s office. Badr prefers the American, Chinese, and German models for military missions, adds Al-Husseini.
In theory, the police should benefit from the reconnaissance and surveillance conducted by the drones of the American-led coalition as the army and the counterterrorism service have. But coordination between the branches of the Iraqi security forces remains poor, and the Ministry of Interior has ingratiated itself with the Shia militias at the expense of its relationships with the army, the counterterrorism service and the Americans. Further adding to the problem, the role of Minister of Interior has for the past two years belonged to Mohammed Al-Ghabban from Badr’s eponymous political party.
In mid-June, the Institute for the Study of War reported Badr and the police had entered Fallujah together (despite the prime minister ordering the Shia militias to stay on the outskirts of the city) and that, concerning human rights defenders, the two had abused civilians in tandem.
Unlike soldiers from the army and counterterrorism service interviewed by WIRED, the police expressed little interest in working with the American-led coalition and its high-tech drones. “We don’t trust the drones of the international coalition,” says brigadier al-Kaabi. “America would provide Isis with advanced drones before it would help us.” For now, the Ministry of Interior and most of its allies in the Shia militias must get their drones at toy stores such as Abu Abdullah’s.
Iran has equipped some of its Iraqi proxies, including Badr, with unarmed but military-quality drones. In December 2012, the Iranian military claimed it hadcaptured an American copy of the Boeing Insitu ScanEagle – a long-endurance drone for reconnaissance and surveillance based on a commercial drone intended for spotting fish. A few Iranian variants of the ScanEagle, such as the Yasir, have appeared in the hands of Iraqi Shia militias on battlefields in Fallujah and elsewhere.
Commanders from Kataib Hezbollah, a Shia militia that the US State Department has labelled a terrorist organisation for killing Americans during the Iraq War, confirmed that they are using Iranian drones in front lines near Makhul and Saqlawiya.
“Over the past few years, Iran has exported drones to a number of non-state actors, including Hezbollah and Hamas,” says Dan Gettinger from the Centre for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York. “I can’t say why exactly Iran would distribute this particular technology, but I can speculate that it seeks to test the drones in a combat environment.” Hamas and Hezbollah have also prepared drones to subvert the overwhelming air supremacy of the Israeli Air Force’s well-trained pilots.
In addition to conducting surveillance through Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran has deployed its own drones to Iraq and Syria, sometimes launching airstrikes. “When the targets are in range of Iran’s borders, the army’s ground forces haven’t been shy about operating their 'border security' UAVs over Iraqi airspace,” Galen Wright, an expert on Iranian drones tells WIRED. Of the Iraqi Shia militias’ Iranian models, Wight says it is "unclear to what degree these are actually operated by Iraqis and to what degree they are accompanied by [Iranian] technical advisors.”
The use of airborne terrorist threats, though recent, has precedent. During the later stages of Sri Lankan Civil War, the Tamil Tigers formed a nascent air force: the Air Tigers. The Tamil Tigers, already notorious for suicide bombings, sent their pilots on a Kamikaze-style raid. A Palestinian journalist explains that Hamas has been developing related ‘suicide drones.’
Drones have spread to the hundreds of anti-government paramilitaries in Syria, where journalists have noted anecdotal reports of Isis developing its own models to carry explosives. The terrorist organisation has already used drones forreconnaissance and surveillance in Iraq. “Some factions of the Syrian opposition have drones, but they’re sparsely used,” says captain Rashid al-Hourani, leader of the Homs Liberation Movement. “The drones assist the revolutionaries in the tactical development of their plans, causing the bases of the [Syrian] regime to fall to them. They’re very useful” Syria's rebels, adds Al-Hourani, procure the drones off the internet.
In Iraq, the Shia militias have allied themselves with the country’s American-backed government, meaning that, at least for now, they have little reason to restart the war against Western soldiers stationed there. Even so, the Shia militias’ access to this technology still requires scrutiny. “The drones locate areas of Fallujah where there are large concentrations of civilians to guide the militias’ rockets toward them,” Muhammad al-Issawi, a civilian in Fallujah, tells WIRED via Facebook Messenger in reference to Kataib Hezbollah. In other words, the militias were using the drones to commit war crimes in Fallujah.
With drones from Baghdad’s commercial markets and Tehran’s military factories, Iraq’s Shia militias may once again catch the attention of Western governments. The US Department of Homeland Security has already voiced its alarm at the potential spread of hobbyist drones to terrorists.
“Generally speaking, there’s space to be worried about proliferating drone technology because of the capabilities it bestows on the operator,” observes Wright. “But the degree to which the technology is available commercially in one form or another means that it’s more or less inevitable and that there shouldn’t be too much hand wringing about it.”
“It's always worrying when terrorist-labelled groups obtain a new technology,” adds Gettinger. “If used effectively, drones could enable non-state actors to adopt more sophisticated tactics than before.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
