18 January 2017

The Drones of ISIS

BY BEN WATSONREAD BIO

Islamic State fighters are launching an ever-wider assortment of deadly drones, even as their UAV factories come under heavy attack. 

Grenade launchers, kamikaze bombers, flying decoys, eyes-in-the-sky, and soapbox-derby dinosaurs: as the Islamic State group loses neighborhood after Mosul neighborhood, it is still dispatching a wide variety of UAVs on deadly missions.

“Over the last two months, coalition forces have observed about one adversary drone every day around Mosul,” a U.S. Central Command official told Defense One.

And they’re doing more to counter it: coalition aircraft have hitISIS-made drones, launch sites, or production facilities in Iraq and Syria every day since Jan. 7, including four strikes west of Mosul on Jan. 10 alone, according to CENTCOM releases.

“The Coalition has struck a number of what we believed to be unmanned aerial vehicle facilities in Mosul,” the official said. “We spend considerable time researching and developing target lists to ensure maximum effects against” ISIS.

It’s not a new concern; in August 2015, coalition forces hit an ISIS drone in Ramadi. But social-media posts and independent reporting from the Mosul war zone are helping to bring the wide variety of ISIS drones to light.

Grenade-dropping drones

On Jan. 4, coalition forces hit a UAV factory — and Iraqi special forces found themselves shooting at grenade-launching and mortar-dropping drones in southeast Mosul, downing one that looks like soapbox-derby material. 

Three days later, Kurdish Rudaw news captured footage (look around the 2:15 mark) of Iraqi troops fending off ISIS-made drone bombers in central Mosul, near the city’s fourth bridge over the Tigris River. The drones, possibly quadcopters, reportedly dropped at least 10 explosives during an hour of fighting. (For what it’s worth, ISIS isn’t the first to use this tactic in Syria; Hezbollah seized headlines with a similar strike on rebels near Aleppo last August.)

Quadcopters

ISIS dispatches several kinds of drones easily acquired online, but “primarily uses quadcopters,” CENTCOM said, “for surveillance and to drop explosives on friendly forces.”

Here’s a pretty close look at one recently picked off by Iraqi special forces inside Mosul. It’s not too dissimilar from this Chinese-made DJI Phantom drone, dubbed “the Model T” of the civilian drone industry, the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2014.

Here’s another good angle from Rudaw News: 



Nice shot of the improvised release mechanism ISIL is using to drop grenades from commercial off the shelf UAVs http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/110120171 …


And here are three images CENTCOM shared with Defense One showing other quadcopter drones captured by Iraqi forces, date and location unknown:




ISIS is using PG-7 HEAT warheads for its air VBIED, its kill area must be relatively small but it can destroy a tank from the top


In early October, an ISIS drone appeared to have crash-landed near a Peshmerga position outside Mosul. But when the Pesh took it apart, the “battery pack” — an IED in disguise — suddenly detonated. Two Peshmerga troops died and two French special operators were injured in the attack, “believed to be one of the first times the Islamic State has successfully used a drone with explosives to kill troops on the battlefield,” the New York Timesreported

Desert surveillance

Here’s one of the group’s larger UAVs, reportedly shot down west of Mosul by Popular Mobilization Units in late November.

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