Afather and two of his young children have come to Capitol Hill to give the US Congress an unprecedented first-hand testimony of the death, injury and fear visited upon innocent civilians by secret CIA drone attacks in remote northern Pakistan.
Rafiq-ur-Rehman, a primary school teacher in North Waziristan, lost his 67-year-old mother, the local midwife, when a drone struck a field near his village on October 24, 2012. Two of his children - Zubair, now 13, and 9-year old Nabila - were wounded in the strike. Yesterday, the three recounted their story.
"Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day," Rehman told a briefing in a packed congressional hearing room organised by Florida Democrat Alan Grayson and the civil rights group Reprieve, and moderated by Robert Greenwald, director of a feature documentary Unmanned: America's Drone Wars.
"Some media outlets reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother's house," Rehman said. "Others reported that the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All of them reported that three, four, five militants were killed. But the only person killed was Mammana Bibi, a grandmother and midwife. Not a militant, but my mother."
The briefing was held just a week after another civil rights group, Amnesty International, issued a report saying that US drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen could be classified as war crimes. The event was a further sign of how unease is growing at the human carnage wrought by drones, as well as the damage done to the reputation of the US.
