WAR is a lucrative business for Britain. In October 2020 it boasted proudly of its status as the world’s second-biggest global arms dealer, coming in behind the world leader, the US.

It cited some £11 billion worth of orders which were won in 2019. Since 2010 it has won £100bn worth of contracts including the sale of Typhoon warplanes to Saudi Arabia and missiles to Qatar.

Quite why this should be a source of pride when large swathes of the population are facing difficulty due to the coronavirus pandemic and the government is refusing to provide children with free school meals, while small businesses go to the wall, is a mystery. 

Death is, however, more profitable than life. But as former US president Dwight Eisenhower — hardly known for his pacifism, as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano reminds us — said as far back as 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Journalist Jonathan Cook described war as “the ultimate Ponzi scheme” as he reflected on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recent pledge of an additional £16.5bn in defence spending, despite the economy facing “systemic crisis.”

At the time of writing Britain operates some 145 military bases in 42 countries around the world, second only to the US. 

Most of these are in the Middle East, although Britain and its compliant media are creating new bogeymen in Russia and China to keep the war racket going.

But technological developments mean that war can now be waged without the need for large numbers of troops on the ground, or even planes in the sky. 

Missiles and surveillance aircraft can be launched from thousands of miles away, without the need for pilots.

When I was in Iraqi Kurdistan in the Patriotic Union Kurdistan (PUK) controlled city of Slemani, the drones that flew over civilian neighbourhoods and the city centre were a reminder of how the face of modern warfare has changed.

The next time I was to hear the distinctive hum was when I spent eight days in the Makhmur refugee camp, abandoned by the UN and targeted by the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) because a large number of its residents are supporters of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

It was an almost daily noise hovering over the camp, loud enough to stir me from my sleep in the early hours of the morning, the time that Turkey usually likes to open fire. 

My stay was just a few months after a missile struck the outer edges of the camp during Turkey’s Operation Claw Eagle military offensive, with video footage appearing to show that a chemical weapon was used in the attack.

It was one of many drone attacks that have been inflicted on the camp’s 12,000 population, with residents telling me they fear another imminent assault as tensions between the KDP, Turkey and the PKK escalate dangerously. 

But to fly over a city of around two million people goes beyond the conventions of war, and was clearly intended to intimidate the residents of a city that Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also considers a hotbed of support for the PKK.

“Nobody is talking about this,” Meral Cicek tells me as I sip coffee on the balcony of a cafeteria overlooking Salim Street, Slemani’s main drag. 

“Drones are a constant menace, but this is a civilian population and there is no war. But the KDP and PUK are silent on this. Maybe you could ask them about it.”

I do, but I too am stonewalled and it seems nobody is prepared to speak out about Turkey’s ever-expanding use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) which has seen them deployed recently in Iraqi Kurdistan, Rojava, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Accusations of war crimes have been made in each of these war zones, but predictably the appeals of civilian populations have been ignored by world powers, despite being presented with evidence of countless atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons.

Three Kurdish women from the Kongreya Star, a confederation of women’s organisations in Rojava, were executed in Kobane in June 2020 in a targeted drone strike launched by Turkey. 

The deaths of Zehra Berkel, Hebun Mele Xelil and Amina Waysi after missiles struck their homes was clearly part of Erdogan’s political genocide against Kurds and his bid to silence women.

It was condemned by Kurdish forces as a war crime, which it almost certainly was. But it exposes the grey area in which drone wars are conducted and was an act straight out of Barack Obama’s copybook. 

It was of course under his administration that the use of drones in targeted killings was to be dramatically expanded.

Obama’s first strike took place just three days after his inauguration and predictably did not hit a “terror suspect” as initially claimed, but wiped out a tribal elder, who was a peace activist and supporter of the Pakistani government, along with four members of his family.

Rather than give the Nobel Peace Prize-winner pause for thought, the opposite was the case, as Obama operated with a callous disregard for human life. 

A New York Times report in 2012 documented the so-called “Terror Tuesdays” during which Obama nominated people to be placed on a kill list.

He and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton have consistently denied killing large numbers of civilians during their tenure. 

But the reason they can do this is simple. The US simply reclassified any male of a certain age living in an area where US drone operated as “a combatant.”

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, some 5,160 people, including 1,124 civilians, have been killed by the US in more than 500 drone strikes since 2002, most of them in Pakistan and most of them under the Obama government.

It is said that if the former president was to apologise for one civilian killed by a drone strike every day, it would take him three years. 

But of course Obama has not apologised for those killed under his administration. It would be tantamount to an admission of war crimes. 

The secretive and unaccountable nature of the drone war, with its ability to carry out precision bombing while not requiring troops on the ground or expensive aircraft, was an attractive prospect for Turkey. 

Guerilla fighters were later to tell me how drone technology had given Turkey the upper hand in its war against the Kurdish people in the Qandil mountains and other arenas, with drones a constant menace, terrorising civilian populations. 

But it could never have expanded its deadly arsenal without the support of the British government and British-based arms development companies. 

Turkey is barely mentioned in early books about drone warfare, with Jeremy Scahill, Medea Benjamin and Patrick Cockburn focusing on the expanding use of UAVs by the United States in their excellent work on the subject.

But since they were written, Turkey has emerged as a new drone powerhouse, with the development of its TB2 Bayraktar armed drone, which fired its first successful missile in 2015, a source of national pride. 

While showing off its capabilities to the Turkish public, it was seen firing missiles at a giant emblem depicting jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

The message was clear, as was the intended target and as were soon the new victims of Turkey’s deadly drone war. 

After the provocative video footage came a sickening mobile phone app in which users were encouraged to “take out” Kurdish fighters who were supposed to be from the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG) in Afrin.

While this was presented as a game, albeit one of dubious taste, it is not too far from the reality of drone war which enables killing by remote control. 

According to the Turkish military, its drone war helped its forces to what it claimed was a “quick and decisive victory” in its illegal invasion of Afrin which started in January 2018.

A report in the pro-government Daily Sabah newspaper said that armed and unarmed TB2s carried out 382 sorties during 4,916 hours of flight time, and aided in the neutralisation of 1,129 terrorists — a catch-all term applied by Turkey to describe all Kurds, including civilians.

“Developed and produced nationally and originally with electronic, software, aerodynamic, design and sub-main systems, the Bayraktar TB2 is one of the world’s most advanced UAV systems in its class with its flight automation and performance,” a glowing report boasts.

Although it is not an accurate description as Turkey’s fleet of armed drones, which is believed to contain between 92 and 94 TB2s, could never have expanded without the supply of British-made components that enable it to fire precision missiles.

I reported for the Kurdish press an exposé of Britain’s secret six-year history of supplying the components that fuels Turkey’s dirty drone wars. 

It suggests that multinational arms manufacturer EDO MBM has continued the clandestine sale of the Hornet micro-munition bomb rack to Turkey, despite a string of public denials.

The Hornet bomb rack is described as the “intelligent hand” that ensures that the missiles fired from an armed drone reach its target co-ordinates allowing for precision bombing. It was first patented in 2014. The carriage system is designed to carry small, light bombs that don’t weigh down the drone.

EDO MBM supplied the technology to Baykar, enabling the company to achieve its aim of self-sufficiency, with the first missile launched from the Bayraktar TB2 drone in 2015. 

When the Guardian reported on the sale of the technology in 2019, company owner Selcuk Bayraktar — Erdogan’s son-in-law — issued a swift denial, insisting that Baykar has developed its own, cheaper and more reliable missile launcher.

But in November 2020 his tweet was removed after a November 2020 report by the Armenian National Council of America (ANCA) containing photographs which clearly showed the Hornet bomb rack attached to a Turkish drone downed in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Turkey is the only country that routinely uses drones on its own citizens, with missile strikes from UAVs having claimed the lives of at least 400 people in south-east Turkey since 2016. 

It has elevated the Bayraktar TB2 to a major source of nationalist pride.

It has been enabled in its activities by Britain which has, since 2015, granted some 80 unlimited-value open licences which allow for an unlimited transfer of equipment over a preset period of time, usually five years.

The government has licensed over £1 billion worth of arms to Turkey over the same period, making Ankara one of the world’s largest buyers of British-made weapons.

But, behind the multimillion deals and government evasiveness there is a human cost, and one that I know only too well after meeting the victims of Britain’s bombs.