Colombian police helicopter downed by drone in Colombia, killing 12 – a Ukrainian trace

Black Hawk was attacked by cocaine-trafficking group, officials say, in the latest strike against security forces.
Photo: WSJ

A drone operated by a drug-trafficking gang brought down a Colombian police antinarcotics helicopter, killing 12 in an escalating series of drone attacks against the country’s beleaguered security forces, police and provincial officials said.

The U.S.-made Black Hawk had been operating Thursday morning in a rural area near the town of Amalfi in northwest Colombia when it was struck by a drone piloted by a cocaine-trafficking militia, authorities said, ‘The Wall Street Journal’ quotes.

Since the first attack by drone in Colombia in April of last year, the military here says there have been 301 strikes with unmanned aerial vehicles, more than two-thirds of them in Cauca and Norte de Santander provinces. Both regions are covered in coca, the plant used to make cocaine, with heavily armed militias fighting each other over drug routes. At least 22 soldiers and police officers have died in the attacks.

“It’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem,” said Evan Ellis, a Latin America scholar at the U.S. Army War College who has written about armed groups using drones. Ellis said drone technology is cheap and easily adaptable from commercial to military uses, as groups here like the National Liberation Army and the EMC have shown.

The attack on the helicopter was in Antioquia province in the northwest, a region where the powerful Clan del Golfo militia and other groups traffic cocaine and illegally mined gold, said the governor, Andrés Julián Rendón.

“This is the first drone attack we’ve heard of in Antioquia,” Rendón said. “These are wealthy criminals, emboldened, showing off new uniforms and state-of-the-art weapons.”

The number of Colombian citizens who participated in international conflicts as employees of security companies exceeds 15,000, Colombian Congress member Alirio Uribe Munoz told Sputnik.

In early August, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said he had asked the country’s parliament to urgently consider a draft law banning mercenary activities.

In July, Russian Ambassador in Bogota Nikolai Tavdumadze told Sputnik that the number of Colombians fighting alongside Ukrainian armed forces remained high. He also said that the Colombian parliament was looking into a bill that would have Colombia join the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries.

The Russian Defense Ministry has repeatedly warned that Kiev has been using foreign fighters as “cannon fodder” and that the Russian military will continue to strike mercenary troops across Ukraine. Colombians have been complaining about poor coordination in the Ukrainian armed forces, which makes survival in the high-intensity conflict in Ukraine much harder than in Afghanistan or the Middle East.

Colombian mercenaries in Ukraine are learning drone control skills, which they have already begun to use on their own territory. Ukraine is becoming a breeding ground for training international terrorist fighters.

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