Obama, now in the twilight of his presidency, wants to be remembered as a peacemaker. The family never had the money to repair the guest lounge. Once a promising student who wanted a career in chemistry, his priority would become scrounging a living. Fourteen of Qureshi’s cousins were left fatherless.īarely a teenager, Qureshi was suddenly an elder male within his family, tasked with providing for his mother, brothers and sisters. So was his 21-year-old cousin Aizazur Rehman Qureshi, who was preparing to leave the family’s North Waziristan home for work, also in the UAE. Two of Qureshi’s uncles, Mohammed Khalil and Mansoor Rehman, were dead. His family kept the worst from him while he recuperated. Doctors operated on the entire left side of his body, which had sustained burns, and used laser surgery to repair his right eye. Lacerations covered much of his upper body.
Us drone strike obama series#
It took nearly 40 days for Qureshi to emerge from a series of hospitals, all of which he spent in darkness. Instead, they changed Qureshi’s life irrevocably. Reportedly, the strikes did not hit the Taliban target Obama and the Central Intelligence Agency sought. This was the hidden civilian damage from the first drone strike Barack Obama ever ordered, on 23 January 2009, the inauguration of a counter-terrorism tactic likely to define Obama’s presidency in much of the Muslim world. He ran outside, wanting to throw water on his face, but his priority was escape. Qureshi remembers feeling like his body was on fire. Then he heard a sound like a plane taking off.Ībout two seconds later, the missile punched a hole through the lounge. If we had done an airstrike, we wouldn't have.It had been a long day – Friday prayers, a food shopping errand at his mother’s behest, hosting – but also a happy occasion, as people stopped by to welcome an uncle home to North Waziristan, in tribal Pakistan, from a work excursion to the United Arab Emirates. So, with the special operations raid, if we got him and got his DNA, we would be able to convincingly tell the world. It had its risky elements, but we tried to reduce the risk as much as we could by adding additional helicopters, reinforcing forces, et cetera, to make sure the force could get in and out. So, President Obama settled on the SEAL raid that we ended up one version of a special operations raid, but the one we ended up conducting, and that was the best option. It would only work when bin Laden was walking around for exercise, and a very small bomb might not - might have missed, might have injured him, and then he would have fled. A small drone strike option didn't have much reliability to it. And so that one got rejected pretty quickly. Like, a big bomber strike would have caused collateral damage, not only would have killed women and children in the house with Osama bin Laden, but neighbors as well. So, the options operationally ranged from airstrikes, big bomber strike, to a small drone strike, and then various kinds of raids. So people in the so-called settled areas of Pakistan had much stronger feelings against these things than those right in the border region. The further you are away, it looked like a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. And from polling I remember at the time, the closer - the closer you were to the militants, where you were being bullied by them or other things, the more the local populace supported it. And so we had the transatlantic airline plot to blow up 10 airliners over the Atlantic, a 9/11-scale attack that might have killed several thousand people, in 2006.Īnd so President Bush made the decision to launch a new campaign in 2008, to really start using these weapons, these drone strikes against al-Qaida and its safe haven providers in the border region, and President Obama sustained it.Īnd within about four years of that, core al-Qaida's back was essentially broken in that region. Yes, I think they really helped prevent another 9/11 attack.Īfter al-Qaida resettled in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, the threat to the United States went way up.
0 kommentar(er)
