Category: Proliferation

Death on Delivery: New Report examines civilian harm from intensifying drone warfare across Africa

Cora Morris
Click to open report

Research by Drone Wars UK has revealed the extent of civilian harm caused by military drone strikes across African states, including Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan. ‘Death on Delivery’, our latest report, highlights mounting civilian death tolls in states newly operating imported MALE-type armed drones across the continent, from manufacturers in Turkey, China, and Iran.

At an absolute minimum, it found, more than 943 civilians have been killed in at least 50 separate incidents between November 2021 and November 2024. Of the six states investigated, five have been verified as operating Bayraktar TB-2 drones produced by Turkish drone manufacturer Baykar, with several also operating Chinese Wing Loong II and Iranian Mohajer-6 armed drones. Most are engaged in ongoing domestic military campaigns against armed insurgent groups, but regularly fail to distinguish between civilians and combatants in their operations.

The report highlights a case study for each country, pointing to the grave consequences of drone warfare for local communities and the families of victims. In one incident in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, more than 85 civilians were killed in a drone strike on the village of Ch’obi, in October 2022. In another, in Nigeria, an ‘error’ of military intelligence killed at least 85 – and, according to some reports, as many as 125 – civilians gathered to celebrate the Islamic festival of Mawlud, in two misdirected drone strikes in December 2023. Throughout the report, numerous examples emerge of drone strikes in densely populated civilian areas, with little evidence to suggest precautions to mitigate civilian harm.

These cases show the urgent need for increased proliferation controls on armed drones, and the clear failures of responsibility of those exporting these weapons in providing them to governments with seemingly little intention of upholding international humanitarian law. The extent of civilian suffering demonstrated in this report should make clear the threat posed by the rapid expansion of drone warfare worldwide, facilitated by access to ever-cheaper weapons systems produced by irresponsible, profit-chasing manufacturers. Innocent civilians living with conflict, political instability and widespread insecurity now confront the added threat of drone attacks, rendering even the most basic facets of day-to-day life – visiting a market, or attending a place of worship – potentially deadly.

The report concludes with a set of recommendations, calling for drone-exporting states to conduct thorough investigations into civilian harm caused by their uncrewed systems, disclosing their findings publicly, and affirming a commitment to civilian protection. Given the significant civilian harm already caused, the international community should urgently establish and implement a new control regime to prevent further proliferation-related harm.

Our report also urges the UK government to work with other states, civil society, and victim groups to develop robust international controls on armed drone transfers and use. The UK should advocate for transparency, oversight, and accountability, including casualty recording and victim assistance, while explicitly condemning extrajudicial killings and affirming the applicability of international law to armed drone operations.

Online webinar  

On Wednesday 26th March 2025  we held an online webinar to examine the issues raised in the report.  Speakers were:

Cora Morris, co-author of the Death on Delivery report.  She joined Drone Wars in July 2024 and alongside her role at Drone Wars, she is a coordinator within Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Team, a research unit collating citizen evidence of human rights abuses worldwide. Elsewhere, she lectures in open-source investigation at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Research Methods (CaRM).

Olatunji Olaigbe is a freelance journalist based in Nigeria. His work has been published by VICE, Al-Jazeera, Inkstick and The Record. His reporting often examines the underlying factors of societal issues and he was a winner of the International Organisation for Migration’s 2021 West and Central Africa Migration Journalism Awards.

Wim Zwijnenburg is a Humanitarian Disarmament Project Leader for the Dutch peace organisation PAX. His work focuses on emerging military technologies and their impact on how wars are being fought and consequences for arms proliferation. He is the author of the reports Does Unmanned Make Unacceptable, Armed & Dangerous, and Unmanned Ambitions.

Click to watch video recording of the webinar.

 

Armed Drone Proliferation: Continued Exports Leading to Civilian Casualties

Chris Cole

The number of states now operating armed MALE drones has risen to forty-eight according to data compiled by Drone Wars UK (see full data here). While operators insist that such systems enable them to conduct ‘precise’ and ‘pinpoint accurate’ strikes without risk to their own forces, evidence demonstrates that drone operations continue to cause significant numbers of civilian casualties (for examples from 2025 already see here, here and here).

New operators since our last update include Italy, Romania, Rwanda, Albania, Kenya, and The Maldives. However, due to the secrecy surrounding the deployment of these systems it is possible that other states may also be operating such drones.

Medium Altitude, Long Endurance (MALE) drones, typified by such as the US MQ-9 Reaper and Turkish Bayraktar TB2 are remote-controlled, reusable systems rather than the small ‘one-way attack’ drones – more akin perhaps to a missile – that are currently being used a great deal in Ukraine and receiving significant attention.

Selected armed MALE UAVs

Graphic: Drone Wars UK

While for many years only a handful of countries – including the US, Israel and the UK – operated these systems, over the past decade the number of states deploying them has increased hugely, with Turkey becoming the pre-eminent exporter.  Out of the 48 states that currently operate armed MALE drones, 23 (48%) first acquired them from Turkey, while an additional eight countries who already had the capability have also been supplied with additional armed drones by Turkey.

Alongside these current operators, a number of states have announced the signing of contracts with suppliers and are anticipated to begin operating armed drones in the near future.  These include Kuwait (2025), Angola (2025), Croatia (2026), Belgium (2026), and India (2029).

Turkey expanding drone warfare in Africa

While Turkey appears to be willing to sell its armed drones to almost anyone, it has particularly targeted African states with at least ten countries on the continent supplied since the beginning of 2022. Several of these states have used the drones to launch strikes at insurgent groups, aping the counterterror strategy of western states, and in doing so have also caused significant civilian casualties.  A forthcoming report, Death on Delivery,  (published on 10 March) will detail the use of armed drones in Africa over the past three years and lay bare the devastating toll of civilian casualties.

While the Bayraktar TB2 continue to be the mainstay of their drone export, Turkey have also begun to  sell  the larger and more deadly Akinci and Aksungur drones, primarily to countries already operating the Bayraktar.   In a significant move, Turkish company Baykar bought Italian UAV company Piaggio in December 2024. Read more →

Proliferation of armed drones continues apace resulting in numerous civilian casualties

Chris Cole

New data from Drone Wars UK shows that more than forty states now operate large ‘Predator-type’ armed drones, with twenty-two countries having acquired these armed drones since the beginning of 2021, more than doubling the previous number of operators.

A full list of countries that possess MALE armed drones together with details of the types of drones they operate, which countries are likely to become operators in the near future and a short narrative report on each country is available on our ‘Who Has Armed Drones?’ page.

For the first time our data shows that more countries have used these armed drones to undertake strikes within their own borders (15) than for strikes against targets within other states (12).  A number of new users including Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Mali have caused significant civilian casualties in drone strikes over the past 12 months.

While the use of smaller ‘suicide’ or one-way attack drones has come to the fore in 2023, particularly for their use in Ukraine and the Red Sea, the larger re-usable systems, known as medium altitude, long endurance (MALE) drones and typified by the US Reaper and Turkish Bayraktar TB2, continues to spread.  Turkey is now the main exporter of such systems with fifteen countries gaining armed drone capability for the first time from Turkey since the beginning of 2021. A  further dozen countries are likely to gain the capability in the near future.

Proliferation leads to civilian casualties

Of the 22 countries that have acquired MALE armed drones since the beginning of 2021, 12 are involved in ongoing internal or external armed conflicts, while a further 7 are states which have simmering tensions with neighbouring states or are repressive regimes.  At least six of the states that have acquired armed drones since 2021 have already used them to launch strikes with a number of these causing civilian casualties.  While Le Monde called Africa ‘the new playground for drone exporters’ with Turkish companies winning multi-million dollar contracts, civilians on the ground continue to pay a high price. Read more →

Small drones, big problem. Two new reports examine the rise and rise of armed ‘one-way attack’ drones 

Chris Cole
From top: Israeli Harop, Iranian Shaded 136, Polish Warmate.

Over the past few years  – and particularly in the on-going war in Ukraine – we have seen the rise in use of what has become known as ‘kamikaze’ or  ‘suicide’ drones.  Two new excellent reports have just been released which examine these systems.  ‘One-Way Attack Drones: Loitering Munitions of the Past and Present’ written by Dan Gettinger, formerly of the Bard Drone Center and ‘Loitering Munitions and Unpredictability’ by Ingvild Bode & Tom Watts,  examine between them the history, current use, and growing concern about the increasing autonomy of such systems.

A drone by any other name…?

Firstly, to address the elephant in the room: are these systems ‘drones’?

Naming has always been a keenly fought aspect of the debate about drones, with sometimes bitter conflict over whether such platforms should be named ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’ (UAVS), ‘remotely piloted air systems’ (RPAS) or ‘drones’. ‘Drones’ has been the term that has stuck, particularly in mainstream media, but is regularly used interchangeably with UAV (with ‘unmanned’ being replaced in recent years by ‘uncrewed’ for obvious reasons).  While many in the military now accept the term ‘drone’ and are happy to use it depending on the audience, some continue to insist that it belittles both capabilities of the system and those who operate them.

Whichever term is used, a further aspect of the naming debate is that an increasing number and type of military aerial systems are being labelled as ‘drones’.  While all these systems have significant characteristics in common (aerial systems, unoccupied, used for surveillance/intelligence gathering and/or attack), they can also be very different in terms of size and range; can carry out very different missions; have different effects; and raise different legal and ethical issues.

One type of such system is the so-called ‘suicide’ or ‘kamikaze’ drone  – perhaps better labelled ‘one way attack’ drone.  There are several different categories of this type of drone, and while they are are used to carry out remote lethal attacks and therefore have significant aspects in common with the much larger Reaper or Bayraktar drones, they are significantly different in that they are not designed to be re-used, but rather are expendable as the warhead is part of the structure of the system which is destroyed in use. Importantly, while loitering munitions are a sub-set of ‘one way attack’ drones, not all one-way attack drones are loitering munitions.

Dan Gettinger’s report ‘One-Way Attack Drones: Loitering Munitions of the Past and Present’ helpfully sets out a history of the development of these systems and identifies three sub categories: anti-radar systems, portable or ‘backpackable’ systems and Iranian systems.  He has compiled a helpful dataset of over 200 such systems (although not all are currently in operation). All of these, he argues, can be traced back to “the transition from the era of jet-powered target drones to that of remotely piloted vehicles.” Read more →

Armed drone proliferation update – March ’23

Chris Cole

We have fully updated our list of countries operating medium altitude, long endurance (MALE) armed drones as typified by the MQ-9 Reaper and Bayraktar TB2.  Just to emphasis, our list does not include states possessing loitering munitions (sometimes dubbed ‘suicide’ or kamikaze’ drones by the media) or other, one-off use smaller systems.

According to our data, thirty-four countries currently possess armed MALE drones although  some of these countries may not be currently using them operationally. Out of the 34 states known to possess armed drones 12 have used them in  cross border strikes and 11 have used them for strikes within their own borders.

Since our last update in May 2022, seven new countries have acquired armed drones:  Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Mali, Niger, Poland, Somalia, Togo and Tunisia.  All have acquired them from Turkey.  While Bayraktar TB2 armed drones are being used in Somalia it is not clear if they are being used by Turkish or Somali forces.

In addition to these 34 countries, we have identified another 14 countries that are likely to acquire armed drones in the near future although this is almost certainly a significant underestimate as  proliferation of these systems, particularly from Turkey, is rapidly increasing.

The full list of countries that possess armed drones, the type of armed drones they operate, which countries are likely to become operators in the near future, and a short narrative report on each country is available on our page: ‘Who Has Armed Drones?’

Turkey’s armed drone exports

Over the past five years (2018 – 2022) Turkey has become the predominant exporter of armed drones.  Out of the 20 countries that first gained armed drone capability in that period, four received drones from China, France armed its US drones and Russia began using its indigenously developed ‘Orion’ (Inokhodets) armed drone. The other 14 all received armed drones from Turkey.  Read more →

Armed drones proliferation update – May 2022

Chris Cole
Click to view full list.

Today we are publishing a fully revised and updated list of countries operating medium altitude, long endurance (MALE) armed drones as typified by the MQ-9 Reaper and Bayraktar TB2. Please note our list does not include states operating loitering munitions (sometimes dubbed ‘suicide drones’ by the media) or other, one-off use systems.

According to our data, 26 countries currently possess armed drones although for four of these, it is not clear if the drones are actually operational. Out of the 22 states known to operate armed drones, 11 have used them for cross border strikes, while 9 have used them to launch strikes within their own borders.

Since our last update just under a year ago, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Russia and Turkmenistan now possess armed drones.  Of these, Ethiopia and Russia are known to have already used them to launch strikes, while Morocco appears to have launched a drone strike in Algeria.  Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan join Kazakhstan on the list of those who possess the capability seemingly for prestige purposes without any evidence that the systems are operational. Jordan’s CH-4 armed drones are non-operational and have been put up for sale, and while were rumours that they were purchased by a Libyan militia this has not been confirmed.  The full list –  and brief details for each country –  are on our page: ‘Who Has Armed Drones?’

Turkey’s armed drone exports surge

Since developing and deploying the Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, Turkey has becoming a significant exporter of armed drones.  As the table below shows, 22 states have acquired armed drones in the nine years between 2013 and 2021.  All bar two of the eleven countries to gain the capability between 2013 and 2018 obtained their armed drones from China.

countries by year - exporter May22c

However, in the last three years, only three of the eleven countries to gain the capability imported their armed drones from China, while six imported from Turkey. In addition, at least three other countries that were already operating Chinese armed drones have now also imported Turkish armed drones (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia).  Read more →