The growing and largely unchallenged use of armed drones by the United States to carry out extrajudicial assassinations and bombing campaigns across the globe amount to possible war crimes and need to be stopped.

That’s the message from two of the world’s most prominent human rights groups, who on Tuesday demanded an end to the secrecy and unaccountable nature of the US drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

Bolstered by new reports from each group, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch held a joint news conference to present their research and called on the international community to come together in opposition to the ‘unlawful’ and woefully destructive trend of cross-border US drone attacks—”some of which could even amount to war crimes”—that have killed countless civilians in recent years and done more to promote terrorism across the world than suppress it.

Amnesty says its report, is one of the most comprehensive studies to date of the US drone program from a human rights perspective and focuses on the area where the highest percentage of the US drone bombing campaign has occurred, the tribal areas in Pakistan along the Afghan border.

And Human Rights Watch’s report,  focuses on covert action in Yemen, including six targeted assassinations that took place there, one in 2009 and the rest from 2012-2013.

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As Rolling Stone’s John Knefel points out:

Taken together, the reports paint a harrowing picture of family members who lost love ones from US attacks and the communities which live under constant threat and fear from the buzz of drones overhead or the missiles that come seemingly from out of nowhere. In that context, the reports attempt to explain why the lawless nature of the killings and aerial bombardments have been so deeply destabilizing to these already fragile regions.

“The US says it is taking all possible precautions during targeted killings, but it has unlawfully killed civilians and struck questionable military targets in Yemen,” said Letta Tayler, senior terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch and the lead author of her group’s report. “Yemenis told us that these strikes make them fear the US as much as they fear Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

Both reports say the US drone program has been allowed to metastasize without any oversight from the international community and argue that the US has staked out deeply troubling legal arguments in claiming that the “world is a battlefield” when it comes to fighting al-Qaeda or other perceived terrorist threats.

“Secrecy surrounding the drones program gives the US administration a license to kill beyond the reach of the courts or basic standards of international law,” said Mustafa Qadri, Amnesty International’s Pakistan Researcher. “It’s time for the USA to come clean about the drones program and hold those responsible for these violations to account.”

According to Amnesty:

“The tragedy is that drone aircraft deployed by the USA over Pakistan now instill the same kind of fear in the people of the tribal areas that was once associated only with al-Qa’ida and the Taliban,” said Qadri.

In looking at specific drone attacks in Yemen, where the US claims a legitimate battle between itself and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (or AQAP), HRW found that none of drone attacks they investigated met even the “US policy guidelines for targeted killings that Obama disclosed publicly in May 2013”. From the report:

According to HRW, the US government has carried out hundreds of targeted killings in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia since 2001. In Yemen, the US is estimated to have conducted 81 targeted killing operations, one in 2002 and the rest since 2009. Research groups report that at least 473 people have been killed in these strikes, the majority of them combatants but many of them civilians.

But as Amnesty’s Qadri asks: “What hope for redress can there be for victims of drone attacks and their families when the USA won’t even acknowledge its responsibility for particular strikes?”

And looking at specific strike accounts in Pakistan, Amnesty found that government reports over who or who was not “a combatant” often misapplied the term, reporting:

The two human rights groups are demanding that the US and international bodies take up their research in order to launch their own investigations into possible war crimes, breaches of international law, or human rights abuses. In addition, Amnesty released this specific list of demands, calling on:

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