By Max Brookman-Byrne, Lecturer in Law, University of Lincoln. Reposted with permission.
It was today revealed by various newspapers (for instance, the Guardian, BBC and Mail) that Sally Jones, the so-called ‘White Widow’, has likely been killed by a targeted drone strike. Jones was described as being a member of ISIS and was apparently killed, along with her 12-year-old son, in June 2017 near the Iraq-Syria border.
As a researcher whose work for the last three and a bit years has been on the lawfulness of drone strikes, the question of whether this strike was lawful or not immediately came to mind. Jones was viewed as a member of ISIS and generally the media has uncritically reported her death, implying an assumption that the strike was lawful. But is this correct?
There is an armed conflict occurring in the situation in which Jones was Read more