Crowds of civilians are seen being held at gunpoint, forced to gather in the Syrian town of Abu Kamal to watch the execution.
A van drove up, and two shackled prisoners were unloaded and shown to the crowd. But a Reaper drone operated from RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire was also watching.
After a few moments, the drone operator dropped a missile on a sniper who was watching the scene from a nearby roof. The crowds scatter in a panic, and the execution is ruined.
Releasing the footage on Tuesday, the Ministry of Defence explained that it couldn’t target the Isis militants on the ground directly because that would have also killed civilians. Instead, they targeted the sniper so that civilians – and the Isis fighters – were simply forced to flee.
The mission was overseen from a heavily fortified combined air operations centre (Caoc) at the Al Udeid air base in Qatar.
Air Commodore Johnny Stringer, commander of UK air operations in Iraq and Syria, said: ‘The individual whom we engaged was a sniper in over-watch to shoot civilians who sought to move away from the execution, let alone to protect the planned execution itself.
‘That particular example for us very much brought it home because civilians had been herded in, forced literally at gunpoint, to go and watch this going on in their hundreds.’
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