Weaponized Drones – Is It an ISIS Strategy?

Weaponized Drones – Is It an ISIS Strategy?

weaponized drone

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ISIS supporters on social media were boasting that the terror group now has an air force after the Islamic State released on January 24th their first video showing weaponized drones being used against Iraqi forces.

ISIS has previously used drone photography in videos to capture aerial shots of battles, and they have also been using drone improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that have progressively gotten more advanced.

According to pjmedia.com, the 38-minute video, posted on YouTube and other content-sharing sites, had been teased for a day with a trailer released by ISIS. It largely features suicide bombers in vehicles, including one young teenager who can barely see over the wheel of the armored car.

ISIS uses drone photography to follow the suicide bombers and film the attacks from the air.

The video uses photography from another drone to show a weaponized drone flying toward its target, and cameras on the weaponized drone itself show the impact from dropping an IED on a group of people in a street. When vehicles start to respond to the scene, a suicide bomber in a car drives in and detonates in a follow-up attack.

zerohedge.com remarks that while Major General Gary Volesky, commander of the 101st Airborne division, described the ISIS drone program as nothing more than “commercial, off-the-shelf kind of things,” their unsophisticated aerial IED attacks have nevertheless resulted in numerous injuries including a reporter and cameraman working for a U.S.-funded media outlet last week in eastern Mosul,.