The United States has begun unmanned drone flights from an airport in southern Ethiopia flying surveillance missions over Somalia as part of the fight against Al Shabaab, the Islamist extremist group with links to Al Qaeda.

US officials confirmed drone flights from the civilian airport in Arba Minch were underway but insisted that the Reaper drones were not armed.

The move is part of a trend towards greater U.S. military engagement on the continent, albeit often in an arms-length capacity. U.S. drones are already based in the Seychelles and Djibouti.

The remote-controlled MQ-9 Reapers are capable of carrying Hellfire missiles and satellite guided bombs and have been used to carry out assassinations of Taliban fighters and commanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

However U.S. officials insist the drones launching from Ethiopia are being used for surveillance only.

Such claims will be met with some skepticism given the recent upsurge in drone strikes on Shabaab training camps and other positions in and around the southern Somali port town of Kismayo since June.

The U.S. drone wars are shrouded in mystery and denial. This week, even as a spokesman for the US 17th Air Force which oversees operations in Africa confirmed the drone flights from Arba Minch had begun, a spokesman for the Ethiopian government continued to deny there were even any U.S. drones in the country.

Ethiopia and the U.S. have cooperated in the past in trying to defeat Somalia’s Islamist militants. In 2006 Ethiopia invaded Somalia with the backing of the U.S. which flew bombing raids from an airbase in Ethiopia.
 

Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar said over the weekend that the United States should be careful not to "test his government's patience" with persistent drone strikes on the country's territory, according to Pakistani media outlets.

The minister was touring a hospital in an unrelated trip when a local journalist asked about the drones strikes, which are operated by the C.I.A. in one of the least-covert covert operations in the agency's history. Mukhtar said that Pakistan was a responsible nuclear power and couldn't accept the killing of its people in drones strikes.

U.S. drones have killed upwards of 3,000 people in Pakistan's tribal areas, by some estimates, since they began in 2004. The strikes have become far more frequent in recent years, however, under the leadership of U.S. President Barack Obama and Leon Panetta, the former C.I.A. chief and current secretary of defense.

Complete coverage: The Drone Wars

Mukhtar added that the government would unveil a new policy on the drone strikes soon. Although Pakistan has long made a practice out of condemning the unmanned aerial missile strikes in front of the Pakistani public, which has grown increasingly angry by the killing of civilians, privately the government has always allowed them to continue.

So has the government finally had enough? Or is this just more politicking?