This is popular front a podcast focus on the very niche and kind of geeky

details of Modern Warfare with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're talking to Nick Waters, a Bellingat researcher who focuses on drones and drone

bombs, specifically how militant groups, jihadis, guerrillas, whatever, how they weaponize

commercial drones. It's not the kind of drones you see the US bombing Yemen

with the kind of drones that you can buy from Amazon and fly about in your

garden if you want to. In 2017 ISIS began fixing

small grenades and mortars to the drones in Mosul, flying them around the place

and attacking the Iraqi military and since then we've seen

other militant groups start using this technique and Nick is going to be telling us

all about it. To keep Popular Front moving forward go to Patreon patreon.com slash popular front

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You've done a lot of work on the weaponization of what you would call commercial

drones so drones you could buy off of Amazon or whatever or in the supermarket why

did you decide to make that your point of research? I was kind of looking for a big data project,

so I've seen other people tracking S. VibIEDs,

suicide-worn IEDs in Mosul.

I want to do something similar.

And I just noticed that a lot of like Islamic State propaganda channels

were pumping out a lot of these images and short videos showing drone strikes so I figured

hey I'll start collecting them see if I could spot patterns that kind of stuff.

So it's really interesting the munitions that led on to the interest in drones and then

turned into this whole like drone strike database which I have now.

...