Cameron asked on legality of drone strike in Syria

LONDON: British media and legal commentators on Tuesday questioned Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to use a targeted drone strike that killed two British IS fighters in Syria.

“The point is not so much that they were British but that he [Reyaad Khan] was targeted in an area that the UK does not currently regard, legally, as an operational theatre of war for UK forces,” said Professor Michael Clarke, director general of the London-based Royal United Services Institute.

“Not least, the prime minister’s announcement will be regarded as jumping the parliamentary gun in announcing the fact that last week UK air power was used explicitly to bomb something on the ground inside Syria,” Clarke said.

The government is expected to ask parliament to approve the extension of British air operations into Syria in the next few weeks.

Clarke said Cameron may be using a “high-risk strategy” to win parliamentary approval and “bury a switch in legal policy inside the complexities of the current refugee crisis.”

Legal

commentator

Joshua Rozenberg, writing in the Guardian, said the “unprecedented attack on British would-be terrorists appears to be within the law.”

But the Independent said Downing Street’s decision not to publish full details of legal advice taken before the drone strike was “echoing the controversy over the legal justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq given by Tony Blair’s government.”

Responding to the criticism on Tuesday, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon supported the decision and said the government “would not hesitate” to take similar action.

The drone strike

in

Syria was

a “perfectly legal act of self defence” as the two men were “terrorists who’d been planning a series of attacks,” Fallon told the BBC.

“There are other terrorists involved in other plots that may come to fruition over the next few weeks and months and we wouldn’t hesitate to take similar action again,” he said.

In parliament on Monday, Cameron said last month’s drone attack was the first in modern times by British forces in a foreign country outside of war.

It was “a targeted strike to deal with clear, credible and specific terrorist threats to our country,” he said, adding that it was backed by government legal advisers.

The prime target of the attack was Reyaad Khan, 21, a British man seen in many Islamic State recruitment videos.

Another British man, Ruhul Amin, 26, was one of two other fighters killed in the attack.

The London-based rights group CAGE condemned the attack and said it set “a dangerous international precedent.”

“The UK government has not released a legal justification for the killing of two British nationals in Syria,” said Ibrahim Mohamoud, CAGE’s communications officer. — dpa

Downing Street’s decision not to publish full details of legal advice taken before the drone strike was echoing the controversy over the legal justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq given by Tony Blair’s government