David Cameron has told MPs that two British nationals fighting for the Islamic State (IS) group have been killed in an RAF strike in Syria.
An unmanned Reaper drone targeted a car in the jihadi stronghold Raqqa last month, killing three IS fighters, despite the fact that parliament has not given its approval for military action in Syria.
The Prime Minister insists the killings were “entirely lawful” – but the former attorney general, Dominic Grieve, has said the government can expect a legal challenge on human rights grounds.
Who has been killed?
The two British victims have been named as Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin. A third unnamed IS fighter died but there were no civilian casualties, Mr Cameron said.
The family of Reyaad Khan (pictured top) had already confirmed his death. The 21-year-old was one of three men from Cardiff believed to have travelled to Syria to join IS.
Khan, who used the nom de guerre Abu Dujana Britani, appeared in an IS recruitment video and boasted on Twitter about executing prisoners.
Curiously, police said back in July that they were investigating reports of Khan’s death, but Mr Cameron today gave the date of the attack that killed him as 21 August.
Ruhul Amin, 26, (pictured below) who was born in Bangladesh but grew up in Aberdeen, appeared in the same video and told ITV’s Good Morning Britain there were “thousands” of other British nationals fighting for the jihadi group in Syria.
Are these the first British IS recruits to die?
Certainly not. Various news organisations have been collecting reports of the deaths of British jihadis, and the estimates range from 45 to 60 killed so far.
An associate of Khan, computer hacker Junaid Hussain, reportedly died in an American drone strike on 24 August. The 21-year-old from Birmingham was said to have been ranked as a high-value target by US intelligence.
As far as we know, Khan and Amin are the first to have died after being deliberately targeted by British forces, a decision Mr Cameron said took place “after meticulous planning”.
What were the jihadis planning?
Mr Cameron said Khan and Hussain were involved in plots to attack “high-profile public commemorations” in the UK this summer.
In June the Sun reported that he had told the newspaper’s undercover reporters about a planned bomb on an Armed Forces Day parade in London.
The Prime Minister said police and security services have stopped at least six planned terror attacks against Britain in the last 12 months.
Read more: How many terror plots have been busted since the 7/7 bombings?
Was the drone strike legal?
It’s too soon for a definitive legal analysis of the British government’s case for launching this operation.
But Mr Cameron was careful to talk about “self-defence” today, stressing that the UK government was acting to defend Britain from attacks, and that it had no other option but to order the strike.
This is similar to the arguments the US government has put forward to justify its similar actions against American citizens abroad.
The death of Anwar al-Awlaki, the senior al-Qaeda recruiter, in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011 remain hugely controversial.
America’s legal case for targeting Awlaki and others rests on the right to protect its own citizens amid threats to national security.
There is likely to be a broad range of opinions among international lawyers about the legality of these killings, as there is about America’s actions.
Shashank Joshi, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “It is interesting that the Prime Minister has emphasised the self defence aspect.
“It does present a number of problems but I think the UK government would have had a very careful legal justification for this.
“In some ways it is surprising that the UK hasn’t had to confront this problem sooner given that the US has repeatedly had to develop a legal justification and defence.”
Downing Street insists the strike was cleared by the Attorney General, but says it will not publish the legal advice it received.
Why wasn’t parliament told?
David Cameron lost a vote on launching military action in Syria in 2013, but MPs approved air strikes against IS in neighbouring Iraq last year.
In July this year David Cameron’s spokesman admitted he knew that British pilots had flown sorties in Syrian airspace. Defence secretary Michael Fallon said a “handful” of RAF pilots were embedded with American forces.
There is no constitutional reason why the British government has to get parliamentary approval for military action – it can use royal prerogative powers to send the armed forces into action.
But it has become a convention, since the 2003 Iraq War, for ministers to put it to a Commons vote first.
Is Britain pulling its weight in the fight against IS?
We FactChecked this over the summer and found that it was probably right to say the Britain had carried out more airstrikes against IS in Iraq than anyone except the US – but our efforts were dwarfed by the Americans.
Research from the website Air Wars, which tracks official statements from various countries involved in the coalition against IS, suggests that is still the case.
A rough comparison of various figures suggested at the time that British bombs had only done about 1 per cent of the damage suffered by the militants.
