WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – More than 100 international human rights organizations have called on U.S. President Joe Biden to stop using drone attacks and air strikes outside of recognized battlefields. They made the call in a letter penned on Thursday in response to recent missile strikes on targets in Syria and Iraq, in which a child was killed along with four anti-Daesh fighters. The 113 global rights groups labeled the attacks “unlawful” and said that it was time to “chart a new path forward that promotes and respects our collective human security.”

Drone strikes have seen consecutive U.S. presidents “claim unilateral power to authorize secretive extrajudicial killing outside any recognized battlefield, with no meaningful accountability for wrongful deaths and civilian lives lost and injured.”
But the attacks have “exacted an appalling toll on Muslim, brown and black communities in multiple parts of the world,” the letter added.
Hawkish U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken justified the bombings, the second such airstrike since Biden came to power in January, as an act of self-defense.
But in a rare criticism of Washington, Iraq said it was considering all legal options and called the attack a violation of sovereignty.