Britain has for the first time killed two British members of Islamic State or Daesh in an unprecedented RAF drone strike in Syria, the prime minister revealed Monday.

Reyaad Khan, from Cardiff, the target of the attack, and Ruhul Amin, from Aberdeen, died last month while driving in a vehicle close to the city of Raqqa, the Isis hub in northern Syria.

A Reaper drone operated by pilots at an RAF base in Lincolnshire killed the two men.

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.

According to the Guardian newspaper, 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.

Source: MENA