Murderous drones : Obama's legacy for world peace
Faheem Qureshi, who suffered serious injuries, including the loss of an eye, in the first drone strike ordered by President Obama. Photograph: Madiha Tahir/Reprieve
It had been a long day – Friday prayers, a food shopping errand at his mother’s behest, hosting – but also a happy occasion, as people stopped by to welcome an uncle home to North Waziristan, in tribal Pakistan, from a work excursion to the United Arab Emirates. Then he heard a sound like a plane taking off.About two seconds later, the missile punched a hole through the lounge. Qureshi remembers feeling like his body was on fire. He ran outside, wanting to throw water on his face, but his priority was escape. The boy could not see.This was the hidden civilian damage from the first drone strike Barack Obama ever ordered, on 23 January 2009, the inauguration of a counter-terrorism tactic likely to define Obama’s presidency in much of the Muslim world. It was the third day of his presidency.
All Qureshi knows about Obama, he told the Guardian from Islamabad, “is what he has done to me and the people in Waziristan, and that is an act of tyranny. If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone program.”Seven years to the day after the strike, Qureshi has never received so much as an admission from the US that it happened. The CIA declined comment for this article, deferring to the White House. Although Obama expressed “profound regret” for a 2015 drone strike on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that killed two western hostages, the White House would not comment on “specific cases”, said a National Security Council spokesman, Ned Price.
“There are so many people like me in Waziristan that I know of who were targeted and killed who had nothing to do with militancy or the Taliban,” Qureshi said, “so many women who have been killed, children who have been killed, but there is still no answer to this. Forget about the answers, there is not even acknowledgement that we were killed.”According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s tally, Obama’s drone strikes in tribal Pakistan alone have killed between 66 and 78 children.“I do not say drones have only killed civilians. They would have or might have killed some militants. But overall, they have killed mostly civilians who have nothing to do with what America is trying to do in Pakistan or Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world,” Qureshi said.
Qureshi warns that America, once known for helping liberate Afghanistan from the Soviet Union, is “hated” in Waziristan like never before.“What we know of the US is this is what they do to people like me. They uproot us, they kill us, they target us, without any reason. They turn our lives upside down. Of course the US is hated in that part of the world, and it’s hated more because of what they’ve done to people like me,” Qureshi said.
“I am the living example of what drones are,” Qureshi said.“They have affected Waziristan as they have affected my personal life. I had all the hopes and potential and now I am doing nothing and don’t know what there is for me in the future.”