Feature: U.S. drone strikes destroying families in Pakistan as indiscriminate attacks kill thousands

People have been busy celebrating the annual Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Fitr in Pakistan's southwest city of Taftan except the family of one local taxi driver Muhammad Azam who was killed along with Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansoor in a U.S. drone strike on May 21 this year in Pakistan.

"It's the first Eid after his (Azam's) death. We feel joyless and there is no excitement. People are going to each other's houses to exchange greetings, but they are visiting our's to express their condolences. Americans have destroyed the lives of Azam's wife and four children," Muhammad Qasim, Azam's grieving elder brother, told Xinhua recently via telephone from Taftan.

Azam is one of the hundreds of Pakistani civilians who have become a victim of U.S. "Predator" and "Reaper" unmanned aerial vehicles' (UAV) indiscriminate missile strikes in different areas of Pakistan since the first attack of its kind on June 18, 2004.

According to the Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), an organization working for drone victims in Pakistan, at least 3,000 named and unnamed Pakistani civilians including more than 200 children have been killed so far by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) controlled drone strikes.

"The constant fear and suspicion caused by the drones have led to psychiatric disorders, as people are afraid of being together even in prayer, or gathering for wedding ceremonies or for funerals because the U.S. drones target common places including schools, mosques and marketplaces," said Shahzad Akbar, chairman of the FFR and Pakistan's first lawyer who started a legal battle against U.S. officials for the thousands of civilian killings.

There are a number of well-documented cases in which civilians were directly or indirectly hit by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

On Oct. 30, 2006, at least 82 people, the majority of them children under 12, were killed when U.S. drones attacked a religious school in Chenagai village in Pakistan's northwest Bajaur tribal region.

In another incident on June 17, 2011, between 40 and 50 civilians were killed when a U.S. drone fired four missiles at a meeting of local elders who were together to solve a business deal issue in the Datta Khel area of Pakistan's North Waziristan.

Last week, the U.S. government claimed it killed between 64 and 116 "non-combatants" in 473 counter-terrorism strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya between 2009 and 2015.

The claim was refuted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent initiative based in the United Kingdom, saying that at least 424 and as many as 966 civilians were killed in 424 drone strikes in Pakistan alone since 2004.

"The U.S. report is a pack of lies. It made me laugh. They tried to prove themselves as caring about human lives, but in reality they are not. We don't know how they conduct their strikes and choose their targets. We believe that drone strikes have killed more than 3,000 innocent Pakistanis and left hundreds of others with amputated limbs," said Professor Saeed Chaudhary, director of the Independent Bureau for Humanitarian Issues, Islamabad.

According to a report by Amnesty International, a number of victims of drone attacks were unarmed and some of the U.S. drone strikes could amount to war crimes.

Pakistan's top political and military leaders have repeatedly demanded an end to the strikes, declaring them a violation of territorial integrity and also detrimental to the country's own resolve to combat terrorism.

On Dec. 10, 2013, Pakistani parliament passed a resolution, saying "This House strongly condemns the drone attacks by the allied forces on the territory of Pakistan, which constitute a violation of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, international laws and humanitarian norms."

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the country's flourishing political party, started a peace march in October 2012 to create global awareness about innocent civilian deaths in U.S. drone attacks. Many international human rights activists and NGOs showed their support to the march.

Thereafter, in Nov. 2013, the PTI workers in Pakistan's northwest province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa blocked supply lines to NATO forces deployed in Afghanistan, demanding a halt to drone strikes.

Despite repeated protests by the Pakistani leadership and public, the U.S. has continued its drone campaign in Pakistan.

On June 12, Pakistan's top foreign affairs adviser, Sartaj Aziz, said senior U.S. officials, who visited Pakistan recently, could not explain the logic behind the recent drone strike that killed the Afghan Taliban chief.

"We have conveyed to the U.S. officials that use of force cannot solve the Afghan problem. The attack has hurt the Afghan peace process," Aziz said.

On Nov. 19 last year, four former U.S. drone operators held a press conference in New York and said U.S. drones are inflicting heavy civilian casualties and have developed a callous institutional culture indifferent to the deaths of children and other innocents.

"We have seen the abuse firsthand. The killing of civilians by drones is exacerbating the problem of terrorism. We kill four and create 10 militants," said Bryant, a former U.S. drone operator. Endit