Combat drones are changing how war is waged in Africa
Nearly 740 drone strikes have been conducted on African soil since the very first one that the US military conducted in Libya 13 years ago.
Simon Allison & Lydia Namubiru
Nearly 740 drone strikes have been conducted on African soil since the very first one that the US military conducted in Libya 13 years ago. Driven by fighting in Sudan, drone warfare on the continent has escalated dramatically in the past two years.
It was the United States of America that laid the template for drone strikes on the African continent – and then spent more than a decade perfecting it, civilian casualties be damned.
The very first drone attack on the African continent was carried out by a US Predator drone in April 2011, operating in the skies above Misrata, in western Libya. Two months later, the strikes started happening in Somalia.
There, the bombs were supposedly targeting Al Shabaab militants – although, given that the US Air Force acts as judge, jury and executioner, and releases no evidence to support their determination of guilt, we shall never know how many of the more than 60 people reported killed by drones in Somalia, were in fact militants.
Since 2011, there have been more than two hundred attacks by US drones on Africa soil. As The Continent’s own reporting has revealed, civilians are regularly caught in the cross-hairs.
In recent years, military drones have become cheaper and more accessible – mass-produced in Türkiye, China and Iran. Access to drones is what gave the Ethiopian government the upper hand against Tigrayan rebels in 2022. Today, drones – allegedly supplied by the United Arab Emirates – are giving the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group, the edge in Sudan’s civil war.
Other African governments have scrambled to acquire their own unmanned aerial vehicles, including Egypt, Libya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even rebel groups like the warring bands in the Sahel are using them: at least eight times since September 2023, JNIM, a Sahelian rebel group, has used drones to drop improvised explosive devices on rival positions in Burkina Faso’s Nord and Nord-Central areas, and Mali’s Mopti.
Where drones are sold as a way of killing specific people, reality says otherwise.
Where drones are sold as a way of killing specific people, reality says otherwise. At least 2,589 people have been killed in reported strikes on African soil, with about a third of them dying in strikes that targeted civilian rather than military positions. And when things go wrong, hardly anyone is held to account.
The technology is new. But it is still civilians paying the cost of war.