The Iraqi army is giving ISIS a taste of its own medicine by bombing them with shuttlecock grenades attached to drones.
The feathered tails, usually found on badminton courts across the world, are being attached to the grenades in order to keep them balanced when they fall to ensure a more accurate explosion.
ISIS had previously been using the tactic to drop bombs on coalition forces and civilians in Iraq, but after seeing their effectiveness, the weapons are now in the hands of their opposition.
Terrorists have used small commercial drones to drop explosives on advancing Iraqi forces since they launched the offensive to retake Iraq’s second city in October.
As the battle now focuses on recapturing west Mosul, Colonel Hussein Muayad’s federal police forces have adopted the tactic, equipping their own remote-controlled surveillance drones with 40 mm grenades that are usually fired from grenade launchers.
‘Residents would stare at the sky during the Mosul fighting, fearing IS drones,’ Nuayad said.
‘Now it’s the enemy whose eyes never leave the sky.
‘They used to hit us once. But we can hit them up to four times with a single drone.’
Lieutenant General Raed Shaker Jawdat of the federal police – who are taking part in the battle alongside a special forces unit – says the new tactic has been very effective.
‘Dozens of terrorists have been killed and wounded. Jihadist movements have been paralysed,’ Jawdat says.
The weapons are oblong explosive devices tipped by small, rounded grenades with a pin near one end and a netted skirt taken from a badminton shuttlecock on the other.
‘That’s so it keeps its balance as it falls,’ Muayad says.
Live footage from the drones can be screened back to the army’s commanding officers for them to pinpoint their targets.
Footage of previous attacks show the grenades falling in slow motion on a group of fighters gathered in front of a mosque and another batch of explosives were dropped on a car.
‘West Mosul is very populated. The roads are very narrow,’ Muayad says.
‘The point with these drones is to have very precise strikes to target the terrorists, not the residents.’
‘Day and night, there are always 12 drones in the air, ready to strike.’
He refused to say exactly how many drones – which can each carry up to four grenades – the police operate.
The devices have been equipped with an extra battery to prolong their flight time and can now cover a distance of eight kilometres (five miles) up from less than five kilometres (three miles) before.
Inside a ravaged courtyard in a neighbourhood recently recaptured from the jihadists, Captain Baraa Mohammed Jassem from the Rapid Response Division said his elite interior ministry force has ‘perfected’ drones available commercially so they can drop explosives on the enemy.
‘We took the… idea from the Daesh terrorist organisation,’ he said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
IS has carried out drone attacks throughout the Mosul operation, with the first record of a deadly attack coming a few days before drive was launched in October, killing two Iraqi Kurdish fighters and wounding two French special forces soldiers.
Over the past months, the jihadist group has posted footage online filmed by the cameras of its own remote-controlled drones of explosive devices being dropped on armoured vehicles and four-wheel-drive convoys.
Jassem says the new technique has been useful to Iraqi forces, particularly when they retook important public buildings earlier this month.
‘With a night drone, we found and carried out a strike on a group of eight jihadists, hitting them directly,’ he said.
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