The killings of US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and another American al-Qaeda propagandist in a US airstrike has wiped out the decisive factor that made the organization’s Yemen branch the most dangerous threat to the US: its reach into the West.
Issuing English-language sermons on jihad on the Internet from his hideouts in Yemen’s mountains, al-Awlaki drew Muslim recruits like the young Nigerian who tried to bring down a US jet at Christmas and the Pakistani-American behind the botched car bombing in New York City’s Times Square.
Friday’s drone attack was believed to be the first instance in which a US citizen was tracked and killed based on secret intelligence and with the president’s say-so. Al-Awlaki was placed on the CIA “kill or capture” list by the administration of US President Barack Obama in April last year — the first American to be so targeted.
The strike took place in the morning hours in the eastern Yemeni province of al-Jawf. A second American, Samir Khan, who edited al-Qaeda’s Internet magazine, was also killed in the airstrike.
Late on Friday, two US officials said intelligence had indicated that the top al-Qaeda bomb maker in Yemen also died in the strike — Ibrahim al-Asiri, who was linked to the bomb hidden in the underwear of the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because al-Asiri’s death has not officially been confirmed. Al-Asiri is also believed to have built the bombs that al-Qaeda slipped into printers and shipped to the US last year in a nearly catastrophic attack.
Khan published a slick English-language Web magazine, “Inspire,” that spouted al-Qaeda’s anti--Western ideology and even offered how-to articles on terrorism — including one titled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
The voices of Khan and al-Awlaki elevated the several hundred al-Qaeda fighters hiding out in Yemen to a greater threat than similar affiliates of the network in North Africa, Somalia or East Asia.
Obama heralded the strike as a “major blow to al-Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate,” saying the 40-year-old al-Awlaki was the group’s “leader of external operations.”
“In that role, he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans,” Obama told reporters in Washington, saying al-Awlaki plotted the Christmas 2009 airplane bombing attempt and a foiled attempt last year to mail explosives to the US.
Al-Awlaki’s death was the biggest success in the Obama administration’s intensified campaign to take out al-Qaeda’s leadership since the May killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The pursuit of al-Awlaki and Friday’s strike were directed by the same US special unit that directed the Navy SEALs raid on bin Laden’s hideout.
After three weeks of tracking the targets, US armed drones and fighter jets shadowed al-Awlaki’s convoy, before drones launched the lethal strike early on Friday, US officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.
Al-Awlaki and his comrades were moving through a desert region east of Yemen’s capital near the village of Khasaf between mountain strongholds in the provinces of Jawf and Marib when the drone struck, US and Yemeni officials said.
A tribal chief in the area said that the brother of one of those killed witnessed the strike. The brother, who had sheltered the group in his home nearby, said the group had stopped for breakfast in the desert and were sitting on the ground eating when they saw the drone approaching. They rushed to their truck to drive off when the missiles hit, incinerating the vehicle, according to the tribal chief, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be associated with the incident.
US officials said two other militants were killed in the strike, but the tribal chief said seven people were killed, including al-Awlaki, Khan, two midlevel Yemeni al-Qaeda members, two Saudis and another Yemeni. The numbers could not immediately be reconciled.
Al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, had been in the US cross-hairs since his killing was approved by Obama last year. At least twice, airstrikes were called in on locations in Yemen where al-Awlaki was suspected of being, but he was not harmed.
In July, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said al-Awlaki was a priority target alongside Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor as the network’s leader.
Bruce Riedel, a Brookings senior fellow and former CIA officer, cautioned that while al-Awlaki was the “foremost propagandist,” for al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch, his death “doesn’t really significantly change its fortunes.”
Al-Qaeda’s branch “is intact and arguably growing faster than ever before because of the chaos in Yemen,” he said.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), as the branch in Yemen is called, has been operating in Yemen for years, led by a Yemeni militant and former bin Laden aide named Nasser al-Wahishi. Its main goal has been the toppling of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and targeting the monarchy in neighboring Saudi Arabia, and its several hundred militants have found refuge among tribes in Yemen’s mountainous regions, where the Sana’a government has little control.
Amid the past seven months of political turmoil in Yemen, al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants have gained even more of a foothold, seizing control of at least three towns and cities in the south and battling with the army.
Al-Awlaki gave the group its international voice. He was young, fluent in English, well-acquainted with Western culture and with the discontent of young Muslims there. His numerous video sermons, circulated on YouTube and other sites, offered a measured political argument — interspersed with religious lessons — that the US must be fought for waging wars against Muslims.
Al-Awlaki exchanged up to 20 e-mails with US Major Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of opening fire at the US military base at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people, in a 2009 rampage. Hasan initiated the contacts, drawn by al-Awlaki’s Internet sermons.
Al-Awlaki has said he did not tell Hasan to carry out the shootings, but he later praised Hasan as a “hero” on his Web site.
In New York, the Pakistani-American who pleaded guilty to the May 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt told interrogators he was “inspired” by al-Awlaki after making contact over the Internet.
However, US officials say al-Awlaki moved beyond being just a mouthpiece into a direct operational role in organizing such attacks as he hid alongside al-Qaeda militants in the rugged mountains of Yemen.
Most notably, they believe he was involved in recruiting and preparing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a US airliner heading to Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009, failing only because he botched the detonation of explosives sewn into his underpants.
Yemeni officials say they believe al-Awlaki and other al-Qaeda leaders met with Abdulmutallab in a Yemen hideout in the weeks before the failed bombing. Al-Awlaki has said Abdulmutallab was his “student,” but said he never told him to carry out the airline attack.
Al-Awlaki began as a mosque preacher as he conducted his university studies in the US, and he was not seen by his congregations as radical. While preaching in San Diego, he came to know two of the men who would eventually become suicide-hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The FBI questioned al-Awlaki at the time, but found no cause to detain him.
In 2004, al-Awlaki returned to Yemen, and in the years that followed, his English-language Internet sermons increasingly turned to denunciations of the US and calls for jihad, or holy war. Since the Fort Hood attack, he has been on the run alongside al-Qaeda militants.
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