Near the city of Fallujah, Islamic State terrorists flew a small, unmanned commercial drone. According to a statement released by the US military, the "remotely piloted aircraft" was "small-scale" and meant for battlefield surveillance.
After being airborne for only a short time, Islamic State militants loaded the aircraft onto a vehicle. A US aircraft then launched a strike which destroyed both the drone and the vehicle, along with members of the Islamic State.
"This RPA [remotely piloted aircraft] was not on the same scale of what we are using," a Combined Joint Task Force official told Fox News. "We did not give it to them. It was not armed."
According to that spokesman, the strike occurred only 20 minutes after the device was first spotted.
This marks the first time that coalition forces have targeted Islamic State drones, and for some experts, it also marks a troubling sign of how UAV technology can be utilized by terrorist organizations. The Pentagon has stressed the drastic difference between the kind of small, readily available drone which was destroyed, and the more deadly Predators used by the military. But some experts note that even relatively harmless technology can be adapted for more nefarious purposes.
"ISIS surely has surveillance drone capability," Christopher Harmer, senior naval analyst with the Middle East Security Project, told the Daily Beast. "They don’t have reasonable attack drones, but I think it is just a matter of time before they jury-rig surveillance drones into flying IEDs. Basically, they could turn them into little kamikaze drones."
While this may be the first US strike against an Islamic State drone, it isn’t the first evidence of the terrorist group’s use of the technology. In 2014, a video, named "Clanging of the Swords, Part 4," was released online. Many angles in this video were shot high above a city in western Iraq, suggesting the use of aerial surveillance.
The US airstrikes carried out on Tuesday also targeted two bridges controlled by the Islamic State, a sniper position, and an IS “tactical unit,” according to the military’s statement. Two separate strikes were also conducted in Syria on the same day.
Also on Tuesday, an American UAV was brought down by Syrian air defense in Latakia. An anonymous US official told Reuters that they had indeed lost contact with one of their drones as it flew over the Latakia province.
