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Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and his entourage were eliminated by an American MQ-9 Reaper drone on January 3, 2020. So – yes and no… His death was primarily due to two men – a pilot and an operator – sitting in an air-conditioned control room at Creech Air Force Base, a thousand miles from Las Vegas.
From here, the US Air Force (USAF) operates its fleet of remotely piloted unmanned aircraft – drones, of which the MQ-9 Reaper is the most dangerous. It’s no small feat with four lead-acid propellers. The Reaper has a wingspan of 20 meters and is powered by a 671 kW Honeywell TPE331-10 turboprop engine. Thanks to him, it can move at a speed of up to 482 km/h and rise to a height of 15 km.
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Drones have already killed hundreds of children
The Reaper can carry four AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, and with these Nevada operators they hit and completely destroyed two cars in Soleimani’s motorcade coming from Baghdad airport. The MQ-9 Reaper can stay in the air for up to 30 hours – but only 14 hours when fully armed. Understandably, the plane responsible for the attack on Soleimani did not fly from the USA, but took off from a base in Qatar. The Persian Gulf region was the scene of both verbal and physical firefights in the months that followed, leading to the accidental shooting down of a Ukrainian Boeing 737 by Iranian air defense forces.
Americans began using drones after September 11, 2001, and since then machines of various types have carried out thousands of “missions”. Estimates of the number of “terrorists” killed by drone assassins vary, as do estimates of the number of civilians who were “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
According to the independent organization The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the United States carried out over 6,700 confirmed attacks between 2004 and 2020, killing at least 8,400 to 12,100 people. Of these, almost 1,700 were civilians and 400 were children.
Who are the Nevada murderers?
In 2015, several former Creech base drone operators came forward to the British newspaper The Guardian with rather dramatic statements about their “work.” The three-person teams (the group includes the pilot and the instrument operator as well as the operations manager) spend up to 12 hours on duty sleeping or playing computer games on their secure monitors.
The reality in Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq, thousands of kilometers away, only mediated by drone devices, is then difficult to assess. In one case, for example, drone operator Brandon Bryant, who had operated drones for five years, tracked a group of people with camels on a Pakistani passport who were allegedly transporting explosives to Afghanistan to use against American targets. Bryant, keeping his Predator (the MQ-1 Predator, the Reaper’s predecessor) out of earshot at an altitude of 7 km, detected no weapons or explosive-like payloads throughout.
The team in Nevada waited patiently for their “targets” to descend into the valley and lie down to sleep. Only then did Bryant light the Hellfire. The five men and their camel were reduced to ashes without any secondary explosions confirming the presence of explosives.
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They are not children, but “fun-sized terrorists”
The former operators also shared with the Guardian reporter the specific facial expressions they developed during their long time on the screens. For example, “no doubters” is a term in their tirade for 100% verified enemies. But you can never have such certainty.
For example, in a village somewhere in Pakistan, when a group of small black shadows appeared on the screen of the operator controlling the drone, they were usually children. For these, the operators’ code language has come up with an extremely cynical name “fun-sized terrorists”, which can be translated as “ridiculously small terrorists”.
The dead at the grave of Sojemání
But Kásem Soleimání was definitely not one of those types of targets. The influential general and commander of the elite Quds Force, who was designated a terrorist by Washington, oversaw Iran’s nuclear program and was considered the architect of the strategy of so-called proxy wars in which Tehran uses friendly militias to advance its own interests in the Middle East region, rather than engaging directly in military conflicts.
Soleimani confirms his influence even after his death. There was already a mass panic at his funeral in January 2020, in which at least 56 people died and more than 200 others were injured. Two explosions near the cemetery in the Iranian city of Kerman where Soleimani is buried on January 3, 2024, killed at least 103 people and injured at least 140 others.
Source: Al-Jazeera, ČTK
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