In a long-awaited announcement, the US government today gave its first assessment of the number of civilians killed in President Obama’s controversial drone programme.

The US said it had killed between 64 and 116 “non-combatants” in 473 counter-terrorism strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya between January 2009 and the end of 2015.

This is a fraction of the 380 to 801 civilian casualty range recorded by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism from reports by local and international journalists, NGO investigators, leaked government documents, court papers and the result of field investigations.

The Bureau’s assessment that a total of at least 2753 people had been killed outside of declared battlefield was similar to the US government’s however – the White House put it at 2436.

Bureau reporter Jack Serle said: “This data release is a welcome step towards greater transparency. However, we still don’t have information on specific strikes, in particular several attacks that killed significant numbers of civilians, according to our monitoring. This makes it impossible to reconcile our civilian casualty figures with theirs. The White House hasn’t even broken down the figures by year or by country, leaving us none the wiser as to how the drone war has progressed since the first strike of Obama’s presidency, on January 23 2009, killed at least nine civilians.”

Jack Searle is the author of this report which can be found at: http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=0592afb78c924d61727f4da3c&id=b15824c5e0&e=28b3da6aaa