![A US-made Reaper drone flies over Nigerien military airport Diori Hamani in Niamey in January 2015. [AFP/Getty/Dominique Faget]](/sites/default/files/styles/d08_standard/public/im/USA_2017/USdrone.jpg?itok=dc0rLgU1 "A US-made Reaper drone flies over Nigerien military airport Diori Hamani in Niamey in January 2015. [AFP/Getty/Dominique Faget]")
The United States plans to retire a model of drone used to carry out strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Somalia, according to an article in The Guardian.
The Land of the Free has maintained that drone strikes are a necessity of modern warfare, and the Bush, Obama, and Trump administration has used them with increasing frequency. Meanwhile, critics point out that drones still cause civilian casualties, encourage terrorism and resentment of the US, and give the western superpower the O.K. to kill more or less at will from afar.
In the wake of US President Donald Trump's travel ban, there is a particular darkness shrouding the victims of US drone attacks. The revised version of the ban forbids travelers not holding green cards/previously issued visas from the Muslim-majority countries of Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.
Excluding Iran and Sudan, every one of the countries on Trump’s ban list has been a target of unmanned, US strikes. Add to the list Afghanistan and Pakistan, and you've got quite an impressive collection of beleaguered nations. However, while many Americans are up in arms about the ban, polls have shown that the majority of Americans have consistently supported drone strikes to take out terrorist targets in the aforementioned nations.
Trump has gotten a lot of flack from Americans and international leaders for his latest executive order, with some people claiming the ban embodies the rising rates of Islamophobia in the west and the United States. However, if we look at Islamophobia through the lense of US drone strikes, it becomes clear that it has been a long-standing institution in United States foreign policy.
Although casualties in remote war zones can only ever be estimates, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism places the minimum possible number of casualties from confirmed US drone strikes in Yemen alone at 603 people from 2002 to present. President Trump's controversial decisions relating to Muslims may seem to fly in the face of previous US foreign policy, but it could be argued that the US drone strikes in the Middle East set an Islamophobic precedent long before his time.
LM
