Death From Above

摘要

Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin would have had no idea what hit them as their vehicle was torn to smithereens by an explosion, most probably caused by a Lockheed Martin AGM-114 Hellfire series air-to-ground missile, on 21 August on the outskirts of the city of al Raqqa, northern Syria. That the vehicle of Mr. Khan and Mr. Amin was attacked and destroyed was of little surprise. Both men were British citizens, but had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) insurgency organisation which has occupied large swathes of north-western Iraq and eastern Syria. What made the attack remarkable was that it marked the first occasion in which British ISIS members had been knowingly targeted by the UK armed forces in an airstrike, in this case using a Royal Air Force (RAF) General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV).