Remote-controlled RAF drones killing Taliban kingpins at rate of one per week
By ANIThursday, October 28, 2010
KABUL - Pilotless drones of the Royal Air Force, flown by remote control, are killing the top brass of the Taliban in Afghanistan at the rate of one per week.
The camera-fitted Reapers have blitzed the enemy 124 times in the last 29 months, The Sun reported.
Thirty-three of the strikes involved 500lb laser-guided bombs, the paper said.
The Helmand hideouts of Afghanistan’s terror chiefs, bomb experts and their vehicles have been targets of the armour-piercing Hellfire missiles, it added.
Last month it emerged that SAS and SBS Special Forces had killed at least 64 of the Taliban’s senior commanders. “SAS and SBS teams on the ground have found them indispensable,” an RAF source said.
Amazingly, the pilots, who are members of the RAF’s 39 Squadron, and fly the hi-tech Reapers by remote control, are not physically present in Afghanistan. They are based thousands of miles away at Creech US Air Force base in Nevada.
Since the Reapers fly at 25,000 feet, the targets have no idea that they are being pinpointed.
Talking of a video showing footage of one fanatic laying a troop-killing bomb, the RAF source pointed out, “The bomb planter is turned to pink mist by a Reaper’s Hellfire just minutes after it spotted him hard at work.” (ANI)
