When Turkish technology becomes a living hell for civilians in Syria: The death toll from Turkish airstrikes in a year is frightening

The last  two decades saw the rise of targeted killing programs by state actors such as the United States, Russia, Israel and Saudi Arabia. While each state has a different approach to targeted killing programs, armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones have become the primary weapon system of choice. UAVs offer the ability to avoid radar detection due their smaller sizes, ability to fly at lower speeds and lower altitudes in addition to counter radar and stealth technology. Initially developed for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) along with target acquisition, the introduction or armed drones created a new opportunities for state’s to support clandestine direct actions with aerial reconnaissance and close air support in addition to targeted killings with high degrees of precision carried out in across foreign borders without detection.

With Israel and the US as the world’s leading and dominant producers of medium altitude long endurance (MALE) and high-altitude long endurance (HALE) UAVs with both ISR and armed capabilities, the two drone powers aimed to strictly control the export of such drones. As the US extraterritorial drone based targeted killings began to pick up attention from the global media with both the killings of foreign nationals on foreign soil and more notably the killing of US citizen’s in foreign territories, all justified as threats to US national security at a time of war, the demand for such capabilities naturally experienced a boom. However, neither Israel nor the US were keen to export armed drones to just any country. Of the many states seeking to acquire these drones, Turkey, a NATO ally of the US was one of the more serious parties pushing to import US and Israeli UAVs.
Rather than directly sell armed UAVs to Turkey, both the US and Israel offered Turkey models that were restricted to carrying out ISR operations. Furthermore, both states set up strict end-user agreements that required that teams be involved in training and operating the UAVs form the US and Israel. The UAVs were also controlled through maintenance and ordering or replacement parts. Both the Israelis and the Americans would require that drones be repaired by their own crews and that replacement parts were notoriously delayed, lost or in need of being reordered. The Turkish state asked the US for UAVs to patrol PKK movements in the Qendil Mountains and along the Turkish and Iraqi border however, the US only agreed to provide older Predator UAVs that would be unarmed and used strictly for ISR purposes and only operated by US personnel with the intel reported back to their Turkish partners.
Despite the best intentions of the US and Israeli governments, the plan only created an even greater demand for MALE and HALE UAVs with both ISR and armed capabilities so that the monopoly of armed long range UAVs would be broken. The inevitable occurred after some disappointing attempts by Turkish Aeronautical Industries (TAI) with the ANKA-S, which when finally was successfully developed was mainly an ISR asset. The greatest breakthrough came when Selcuk Bayraktar, an advanced student at top US tech university the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had developed a prototype for a MALE UAV that he dropped out of his program to bring back to Turkey and with a little bit of help from his future father in law then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his father’s successfully Bakar Makina Industries, Selcuk created the first inception of what would eventually become Turkey’s first and most effective domestically produced MALE UAV which later had armed capabilities through a partnership with Turkish arms producer Roketsan with the MAM-C missiles.
By 2017/18, the Bayraktar TB-2 had advanced and had began to be deployed in Rojava, Bakur, Basur and in some alleged cases as far as parts of Rojhelat. This was the beginning of Turkey’s own targeted killing program. A program with much more liberal standards of what constituted a threat to Turkey’s national security that arguably even those of the US and Israel. Turkey’s program targeted both Turkish citizens and foreign nationals in a campaign of targeted killings that has exponentially grown since its inception and has included striking targets inside Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya and most notably in recent years the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) breakaway region as part of Turkey’s substantial military intervention on behalf of both the Muslim Brotherhood Dominated Government of National Accord (GNA) and the Azeri forces in their aggressive invasion of the predominately Armenian region of Artsakh along with Amenia proper. The Azeri nationalist propaganda of the war on Artsakh served as a global publicity for the TB-2 Bayraktar with a number of African, Middle Eastern, Eastern European and Balkan states lining up for contacts to import TB-2s, ground control stations and Turkish training.
The Turkish invasions of Afrin in 2018 along with Giri Spie and Sere Kaniye in 2019 showcased the full capabilities of he TB-2s against a force with no air defenses other than tunnels and more disturbingly showed how these drones were used to deliberately target ambulances, press vehicles and Tactical Combat Casualty Care Points (TCCCPs) along with clearly marked hospitals. A recent report from the Rojava Information Center details in depth the escalation and apparent lack over any respect for the law of armed conflict (LOAC) or International Human Rights Laws (IHRL) which are intended to set the ground rules for war and and more importantly protect and limit the harm to civilians and non-combatants. The report has indicated that the year over year statistics of Turkish drone strikes in Rojava alone are growing exponentially, being carried out in areas where the air space is supposed to me managed by both the Russian and US-led international coalition. The report states “in 2022, in North and East Syria (NES), RIC recorded 130 drone strikes, killing 87 people and injuring 151” (RIC, March 2023). Impacting the region by “obstructing the global mission to defeat ISIS, hampering democracy-building efforts, and engendering an unstable and insecure environment for civilians” not to mention the unsurmountable human cost that these attacks have incurred. Similarly, Turkey continues to wages it’s extrajudicial drone war against Kurdish militants and civilians alike in Iraqi Kurdistan, despite numerous protests from the Iraqi federal government in Baghdad. The operations in Iraq have been intensifying since 2018 and have seen Turkish military and intelligence bases installed with the Turkish military occupying Iraqi sovereign territory as deep as 40+ kms from the Turkish border and drone strikes that have illegally entered Iraqi airspace as far south as Sulaymaniyah, Kalar, and Kifri, several hundreds of kms from the Iraqi-Turkish border.
Turkey’s extrajudicial and extraterritorial operations, along with the lack of response from the international community and regulatory bodies have set a dangerous precedent for the future of conflict with a chilling effect. Add to that the fact that the demand for armed TB-2s is on the rise in countries all over the world, including many with dubious human rights records. The liberal sale of these drones has also served to prolong brutal civil wars in Eritrea, Libya, Syria, and conflicts in Iraq, Artsakh, and Ukraine. Despite strong condemnations from politicians around the world and lackluster bans on materials needed for the TB-2s, Turkey and Bayraktar seem to still be producing, exporting and deploying Tb-2s domestically and around the globe and are even nearing completion of an aircraft carrier set for the Mediterranean that has be redesigned to carry TB-2s and Bakraktar’s newest “F-16 of drones” the Akinci, an arms bearing MALE UAV with a greater weapons payload, more advanced counter radar equipment and longer ranges. Lastly, it was Turkey who allegedly tested the first fully autonomous armed drone in a lethal strike on human targets in Libya, the Kargu II. Given the gravity of rising military tension in the current geopolitical climate, are these the kind of precedents that will support the spirt of IHRL and the series of legislation and military ethics that have been rigorously studied so that we can limited a repeat of devastation and trauma reaped upon generations after two World Wars, the constant threat of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War or are we promoting an equal opportunity for a disregard for history and the prioritization of the arms industry over the value of human life?