UK forces kill British IS fighters in targeted drone strike

London

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The British government authorised an unprecedented airstrike in Syria that killed two Britons fighting with Islamic State, David Cameron has announced.

The target of the RAF drone attack was Reyaad Khan, a 21-year-old from Cardiff who had featured in a prominent Isis recruiting video last year. Two other Isis fighters were killed in the attack on the Syrian city of Raqqa on 21 August. One of them, Ruhul Amin, 26, was also British.

Cameron justified the assassination in the sovereign territory of another country on the basis that Khan represented a specific threat to UK security, and that he had exercised the country’s “inherent right to self-protection”. He said the strike was not part of the coalition’s general fight against Isis in Syria.

“It was necessary and proportionate for the individual self-defence of the UK,” Cameron said on Monday.

A third Briton, Junaid Hussain, 21, was killed by a separate US airstrike, he confirmed.

The prime minister faced questions over the strikes on Monday night when Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative chairman of the treasury select committee who has led a campaign against rendition flights, called for an investigation by parliament’s intelligence and security committee. “The ISC exists to scrutinise decisions like this,” Tyrie said. “As soon as they are created [the process to appoint members to the committee in the new parliament] they should do so.”

The committee would be allowed to see the intelligence that prompted Cameron to become the first UK prime minister to authorise an attack by an unmanned drone outside a formal conflict. Cameron could face questions about whether the strikes amounted to killings of UK citizens outside the UK jurisdiction in an echo of the “death on the rock” shooting of IRA terrorists in Gibraltar by the SAS in 1988.

Amnesty International condemned the killing. Its UK director, Kate Allen, said: “It’s extremely alarming that the UK has apparently been conducting summary executions from the air. In following the United States down a lawless road of remote-controlled summary killings from the sky, the RAF has crossed a line.”

It is understood that the strikes against Khan and Hussain were part of a joint operation by the UK and the US. Khan was killed by an RAF Reaper drone on Friday 21 August while Hussain was killed by the US the following Monday.