Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

23. “If Your Son Does Not Come to Us, He Will Be Killed by the Americans”

YEMEN, 2007–2009—During Anwar Awlaki’s time in solitary confinement in a Yemeni prison, al Qaeda in Yemen had made a comeback. While the Bush administration’s civilian leadership largely ignored the resurgence, JSOC was tracking al Qaeda’s new organization in Yemen closely. On March 27, 2007, a Yemeni military unit in the province of Hadramaut discovered a US spy drone that had washed up on the shore of the Arabian Sea. The “Scan Eagle” was an unarmed aerial reconnaissance vehicle that had been launched off the USS Ashland, which deployed to the area in early 2007 to support Combined Task Force 150’s counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa. Human rights groups also alleged that the Ashland was being used by US forces as a floating prison to hold al Qaeda suspects picked up in the region. The day after the Yemeni military recovered the aircraft, President Saleh spoke to the US chargé d’affaires in Yemen, who tried to assure Saleh that the Scan Eagle had crashed in the sea and had not entered Yemeni territory. Saleh told the US official he didn’t buy that story but promised that Yemen would not “turn this into an international incident,” according to a US diplomatic cable sent after the phone call, and “would instruct [Yemeni] government officials not to comment.” Instead, Saleh’s government put out a cover story that helped bolster Saleh’s propaganda campaign against Iran. On March 29, official Yemeni media outlets reported that the Yemeni military had shot down an Iranian “spy plane” after consulting with “multinational forces” in the region. Saleh “could have taken the opportunity to score political points by appearing tough in public against the United States, but chose instead to blame Iran,” according to the US cable. The crashed drone was an omen of things to come.

As al Qaeda regrouped in Yemen, it began to carry out a series of small-scale actions, primarily in Marib Province, the site of the 2002 US drone strike that killed Harithi, including suicide attacks against oil and gas facilities. In March 2007, they assassinated the chief criminal investigator in Marib, Ali Mahmud al Qasaylah, for his alleged role in the drone strike. In an audiotaped message, Wuhayshi’s deputy, Qasim al Rimi, announced that Wuhayshi was officially the new head of al Qaeda in Yemen. In the message, Rimi vowed the group would continue to take revenge on those responsible for the US drone strike. Two weeks after Rimi’s tape was released, suicide bombers attacked a convoy of Spanish tourists in Marib, killing eight of them, along with two Yemeni drivers.

After eighteen months in prison, Awlaki reentered a world in which the US wars he had grown to militantly oppose had spread. Now, it seemed, war was coming to Yemen. As JSOC and the CIA intensified their operations, Awlaki’s story became like a mirror image. When Awlaki was freed in late 2007, he did not go into hiding, as the US government alleged. He went home to his family in Sana’a and tried to figure out a way to support them and to continue his preaching.

In an interview days after his release, Awlaki was asked if he would return to the United States or Britain to preach. “Well, I would like to travel. However, not until the US drops whatever unknown charges it has against me,” he replied. “The truth of the matter is I am not banned from return to the US. I left the US on my own accord and refuse to return by my own choice,” Awlaki said later. “In fact the opposite is true. The US consul encouraged me to return to the US during his visit to me while I was incarcerated. Alhamdulillah [thanks be to God], Allah has blessed me with living in a blessed land by the witness of Rasulullah [the prophet]. Why should I replace that with life in the US? But I refuse to even visit the US because the US government is not to be trusted as they are liars just like their media.” As to what he would do next, Awlaki said, “I have a few opportunities open at the moment and I haven’t chosen yet among them. I’m still sort of studying the situation at the time being.”

In early 2008, the Internet became Awlaki’s digital mosque, where he could reach Muslims across the globe. In February, he established his own website, www.Anwar-AlAwlaki.com, titled “Imam Anwar’s Blog.” He set up a Facebook page, which drew thousands of subscribers. “In the old times it used to take a few days to travel, for example, from Makkah to Madina which are only 450 km apart. Now we can communicate all over the globe within seconds; text, audio and video, all within seconds. So I would like to tell all of the brothers out there whom I personally know and whom I spent memorable time with: Assalamu alaykum and insha Allah I will never forget you,” Awlaki wrote in his first blog post. “And to those whom I grew to know through these modern means of communication but the circumstances have separated me from meeting them, nevertheless, I still feel a bond with them and I love them for the sake of Allah because they have chosen to follow Islam: Assalamu alaykum, and if we don’t meet in this world then we ask Allah to make us of those who would meet while reclining on the thrones of Paradise.”

Awlaki’s website had a vibrant comment section, and he built up a large online community to whom he was very responsive. The humanity—and an attention to mundane discussion—Awlaki showed in these discussions complicated the cartoonish descriptions of him in Western media and helped to explain his appeal, particularly to some Western Muslims. In one post headlined “Do You Like Cheese?” Awlaki posed a question: “Cheese is great. So if you are a fan of cheese you might be asking yourself the question, is cheese made by non-Muslims allowed or not?” In another blog post, Awlaki addressed Koran-compliant financial practices for Muslims living in the United States and warned against taking out home mortgages. “If you are a person whom Allah has bestowed wealth upon then you should avoid owning property in the US and you should diversify out of the dollar into gold and silver,” he wrote. “In addition to this being the prudent thing to do from a financial point of view, it is also the recommended thing to do Islamicly. Muslims should not be supporting the economy of a nation that is fighting them. Finally, for those who are contemplating purchasing a home in the US based on mortgage which is a clear form of Riba (usury) they should fear Allah.”

But Awlaki’s posts also bristled with hostility to the United States and showed a clear radicalization of his own politics. Completely gone was any moderate tone about the United States or democracy. “Muslims do not try to infiltrate the system and work from within. It is just not our way. It is the way of the Jews and the munafiqeen (hypocrites) but not the way of the Muslims,” he wrote in an August 2008 blog post. “As Muslims we should not subject Islam to the whims of the people, if they chose it we implement it, if they don’t we accept the choice of the masses. Our position is that we will implement the rule of Allah on earth by the tip of the sword whether the masses like it or not. We will not subject sharia rule to popularity contests. Rasulullah (the prophet) says: I was sent with the sword until Allah alone is worshiped. That path, the path of Rasulullah, is the path we should follow.” He added: “Today the Muslim world is under occupation and the statements of our scholars are clear that it becomes fardh ayn (a binding duty) on every able Muslim to fight to free the Muslim land. When something is fardh ayn it is fardh ayn. You cannot theorize or hypothesize otherwise. The ruling is clear and the implications of it are clear.” Awlaki praised the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia as two “successful examples, even though far from perfect,” of a system of Islamic governance. Jihad, he wrote, “is what [military theorist Carl von] Clausewitz would refer to as ‘total war’ but with the Islamic rules of engagement. It is a battle in the battlefield and a battle for the hearts and minds of the people.”

Awlaki began urging followers in the United States to break with its government and society and to withdraw from any participation in the political process:

The US intelligence community saw Awlaki’s web sermons as a threat. Some officials began a whisper campaign against him in the US press. “There is good reason to believe Anwar Aulaqi has been involved in very serious terrorist activities since leaving the United States, including plotting attacks against America and our allies,” an anonymous US counterterrorism official told the Washington Post in February 2008, though no evidence was presented.

On his blog and through e-mails, Awlaki fielded questions on whether Western Muslims should participate in jihad and began debating the merits of traveling to the front lines to fight. A new generation of young disenfranchised Muslims was eagerly seeking out Awlaki’s videos and audio recordings. One of the most popular was “Constants on the Path of Jihad,” an audio lecture believed to have been recorded in 2005. The lecture was based on the teachings of Yusuf al Ayyiri, the first operational leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and an articulate guerrilla warfare strategist who was killed by Saudi security forces in 2003. In the lecture, Awlaki advanced Ayyiri’s teachings on jihad, weaving the stories of epic battles fought by Islamic warriors defending their faith into a current context. “Whenever you see the word terrorist, replace it with the word mujahid,” Awlaki declared. “Whenever you see the word terrorism, replace it with the word jihad.” Every “government in the world is united to fight against Islam,” Awlaki added. “People try to find a way of bailing out of Jihad because they do not like it. The reality of war is horrible and that’s why people try to avoid it, but fighting is proscribed upon you, it is an instruction from Allah.” True Muslims, Awlaki said, citing Ayyiri’s writings, define victory not as simple military triumph but as the act of sacrifice. “The Mujahid sacrificing ‘his self’ and his wealth is victory. Victory of your idea, your religion. If you die for your religion, your death will spread the da’wa [proselytizing on behalf of Islam]…. Allah chooses Shuhada [martyrs] from amongst the believers. This is a victory.”

CIA and FBI counterterrorism analysts began poring over Awlaki’s sermons, looking for clues the preacher may have dropped about his potential connections to al Qaeda. They discovered no specifics, but they saw a threat in his influence and the inspiration others found in him. Intercepts from multiple terror investigations kept producing references to Awlaki’s sermons, particularly the “Constants” lecture. “In a sense, al Awlaki crosses this bridge, speaking in Arabic but he also speaks in English and he’s an American citizen and so he knows, therefore, how to address the youth,” Dr. Emile Nakhleh, the former senior CIA officer who ran the Agency’s Political Islam Division, told me. “And so the danger is not that he is another bin Laden—the fear of Awlaki among some people in the government is that he represents this new phenomenon of recruitment, recruiting ordinary people who fall under the radar.”

As Awlaki’s online popularity grew—many of his posts had hundreds of commenters asking him for advice—the United States was putting tremendous pressure on the Yemeni intelligence services to rearrest him. “The Americans were very, very angry with the [Yemeni] government,” recalled Saleh bin Fareed, the leader of the Aulaq tribe, who would meet regularly with both US and Yemeni officials to resolve disputes between the government and Yemeni tribes. “They were really annoyed. And I think they put a lot of pressure on the [Yemeni] president to take him back” into custody. Awlaki was followed everywhere he went. “He was harassed, and he was under surveillance all the time he was in Sana’a. And he could not do anything,” recalled Awlaki’s father, Nasser, who lived with his son at the time. “They were watching him very closely,” added bin Fareed. “And he did not like that. Wherever he goes, intelligence would be on his left and right. He goes to the mosque, they are with him; he goes by car, they are behind him; he goes to eat, they also eat. I think he did not feel free.”

Awlaki’s friend Shaykh Harith al Nadari recalled, “We were under intensified surveillance and harassment,” and Awlaki determined that “Sana’a was no longer a suitable place for us to stay.” Anwar ultimately decided to leave Sana’a to go to Ataq, the provincial capital of Shabwah, his family’s tribal land in southern Yemen, near the Arabian Sea. He thought he would be left alone by the Yemeni intelligence services and the US government. He was wrong.

Washington was relentless in its pressure on the Yemeni regime. When Anwar left Sana’a, US intelligence demanded that Yemen’s security services return him there. The head of Yemen’s elite US-trained and -funded Counter Terrorism Unit, Yahya Saleh, told Nasser, “If your son does not come to us, he will be killed by the Americans.” Nasser and bin Fareed both traveled to Shabwah to try to compel Anwar to return to Sana’a. “I went to Shabwah. I met Anwar. I tried to convince him,” bin Fareed told me. “He told me, ‘Uncle, I will not. I was born a free man. I don’t want anybody to tell me where to sleep, where to put my head, which direction I will put it. I assure you I have nothing to do with terrorism, I have nothing to do with al Qaeda—I go from my house to the mosque, and those who attend are all from the village. I post on the Internet [and] people ask me questions, I answer. I preach Islam, and that’s my job.” Anwar told his powerful uncle, If you find any evidence I am involved with terrorism, “you come and take me and you put me in jail.”

Awlaki had originally brought his wife and children with him to Ataq, but they eventually moved back to Sana’a to live with his parents. In Ataq, family sources told me, Anwar was subjected to continued surveillance by Yemeni intelligence agents. Awlaki decided to move further away to elude their grasp—leaving Ataq and moving to the family’s small village, al Saeed, in rural Shabwah. “It’s a small village. I mean, there are a few thousand people who live in the valley there. All of them are from the same tribe,” bin Fareed told me. “If somebody comes from another village, it’s known that he’s a stranger. So, they know each other. I think the Americans did not like this.” In his family’s village, Awlaki continued his blogging, growing ever more radical. He began telling friends and family that he believed the United States was tracking him.

THE US HUNT FOR AWLAKI coincided with al Qaeda’s own escalation of attacks in Yemen. On September 17, 2008, the group launched a massive kamikaze attack on the US Embassy in Sana’a. The fortresslike compound was hit in a coordinated assault with vehicle bombs, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and automatic weapons, resulting in the deaths of thirteen guards and civilians, one of whom was an American. The six attackers all died as well. Al Qaeda declared it a successful strike. “This attack is a reminder that we are at war with extremists who will murder innocent people to achieve their ideological objectives,” President Bush said as he sat next to General David Petraeus at the White House. “One objective of these extremists as they kill is to try to cause the United States to lose our nerve and to withdraw from regions of the world.”

Petraeus would soon assume command of CENTCOM, where he would oversee the US wars—declared and undeclared—in the Middle East. One of his jobs would be to coordinate an expansion of covert US military strikes in Yemen. In May, shortly after he received word that he would become CENTCOM commander, Petraeus met in Qatar with the CIA director, Michael Hayden, as well as with JSOC’s commander, Admiral McRaven, and others, to discuss plans for increasing the strikes against al Qaeda suspects wherever they operated.

As news of the embassy bombing broke in the United States, Petraeus’s future boss, Senator Barack Obama, was on the campaign trail. “It just reminds us that we have to redouble our efforts to root out and destroy international terrorist organizations,” Obama commented during a stop in Grand Junction, Colorado. Yemen was beginning to rise above its status as a back-burner issue.

Michael Scheuer, the twenty-two-year CIA veteran and the former head of the Agency’s bin Laden unit, observed that “Al-Qaeda’s organization in Yemen seems to have stabilized after the period of turmoil and governmental suppression that followed the November 2002 death of its leader Abu Ali Harithi.” Scheuer added: “For al-Qaeda, Yemen provides a pivotal, central base that links its theaters of operation in Afghanistan, Iraq, East Africa and the Far East; it also provides a base for training Yemeni fighters and for the rest and refit of fighters from multiple Islamist groups after their tours in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.” In all, there were dozens of documented al Qaeda attacks on Yemeni soil from 2000 through the end of the Bush administration. Over the years, US military aid and CIA financing was increased. “When [al Qaeda] starts creating problems in Yemen, the US money starts flowing,” asserted the former senior counterterrorism official. “For Saleh, al Qaeda is the gift that keeps on giving. They are his number one fund-raiser to get Saudi and US money.”

In October 2008, the US base at Djibouti was officially placed under the control of AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s sixth unified geographic command. Yemen remained under CENTCOM’s area of responsibility and would become a major focus for Special Operations Forces under the banner of SOC(FWD)-Yemen (Special Operations Command-Forward Yemen). While Saleh managed his complex relations with the United States through official channels, on occasion, according to US Special Operations Forces veterans, JSOC teams carried out “unilateral, direct actions” against al Qaeda suspects in Yemen. These operations were never mentioned in public, and some may have been conducted without Saleh’s knowledge or direct authorization. “During that period we were training and building the indigenous security forces in Yemen,” a former aide to a senior JSOC leader told me. “Simultaneously we were targeting and then killing people who were suspected or had been confirmed to be al Qaeda extremists in and around the Peninsula, and within Yemen itself.” Although Yemen was increasingly surfacing on the radar of JSOC and the CIA, the country would remain largely out of the headlines. During the three presidential debates between Barack Obama and John McCain in the 2008 election, Yemen was not mentioned once.

Barack Obama campaigned on the idea that Bush had drained resources in Iraq that should have been used to fight al Qaeda. “There was no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade,” Obama had declared in February 2008. “They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11, and that would be Al Qaeda.” The new president pledged to rearrange US priorities to Afghanistan, where he would place JSOC’s former commander, General McChrystal, in charge of the war, but Obama would soon realize that his pledge to take the fight to al Qaeda would not be limited to Afghanistan. The tiny Arab nation of Yemen would become a major piece on Obama’s counterterrorism chessboard.

AS THE EIGHT-YEAR-LONG BUSH ERA drew to a close, and the US election campaign entered its final weeks, Awlaki railed against the hopes that Muslims in the United States and globally were voicing about the candidacy of Barack Obama. “The promoters of participation in American elections argue that we are choosing the least of the two evils. This principle is correct but what they are missing is that in the process of choosing the lesser of the two evils they are committing an even greater evil,” Awlaki wrote in October 2008. “The types of candidates that American politics has been spitting out is absolutely disgusting. I wonder how any Muslim with a grain of iman [faith] in his heart could walk up to a ballot box and cast his vote in endorsement of creatures such as McCain or Obama?!” He added: “No matter how irrelevant your vote is, on the Day of Judgment you will be called to answer for it. You, under no coercion or duress, consciously chose to vote for the leader of a nation that is leading the war against Islam.” In a subsequent post, Awlaki wrote that “on most of the issues that concern Muslims there is very little difference” between McCain and Obama. “For example they have similar views on the war on terror and the issue of Palestine. Anyone with a simple understanding of the history of American politics would realize that on the major issues both parties share the same agenda.”

As Awlaki escalated his rhetoric, the US intelligence community was elevating his perceived threat level. A month before Barack Obama’s election, a tiny window was opened into how Awlaki was viewed when Charles Allen, the undersecretary of homeland security for intelligence and analysis, described Awlaki as “an al-Qaeda supporter, and former spiritual leader to three of the September 11 hijackers.” This was the first time a US official had publicly linked Awlaki to terrorism. Allen charged that Awlaki “targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen.” When Allen’s remarks were published, Awlaki shot back on his blog. Regarding the characterization of him as a “spiritual adviser” to some of the hijackers, Awlaki wrote: “This is a baseless claim that I have refuted again and again during the FBI’s interrogations and with the media. The US government and the media still insist on spreading this lie around.” As for encouraging terrorist attacks, Awlaki responded, “I would challenge him to come up with one such lecture where I encourage ‘terrorist attacks.’” But, in the eyes of the US government, Awlaki’s calls for jihad amounted to encouraging such attacks.

As president-elect Obama began to build his foreign policy and counterterrorism teams, Yemen would emerge as a major priority. Although most of the United States and the world had never heard of Anwar Awlaki, the new administration was monitoring his movements in Yemen. US authorities presented no concrete evidence that Awlaki was actively involved in any terror plots, but they asserted that he was an inspirational figure whose sermons kept popping up in investigations into various terror plots: in 2006, a group of Canadian Muslims charged with plotting to storm parliament and behead the prime minister were found to have listened to Awlaki speeches. In addition, some of the men convicted in the 2007 plot to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey were heard praising Awlaki, according to a recording made by a government informant. Other references to Awlaki were registering on the radar in investigations in the United Kingdom, as well as in Chicago and Atlanta. Awlaki was openly praising al Shabab in Somalia, where the United States was becoming increasingly concerned about Western Muslims joining the jihad. A group of young Somali Americans from Minneapolis who had traveled to Somalia to join al Shabab were allegedly inspired by Awlaki’s “Constants on the Path of Jihad.”

In a December 21, 2008, blog post titled “Salutations to al-Shabab of Somalia,” Awlaki wrote that the group’s seizing of territory in Mogadishu and elsewhere in Somalia “fills our hearts with immense joy. We would like to congratulate you for your victories and achievements…. Al-Shabab not only have succeeded in expanding the areas that fall under their rule but they have succeeded in implementing the sharia and giving us a living example of how we as Muslims should proceed to change our situation. The ballot has failed us but the bullet has not.” He contrasted al Shabab’s armed insurrection against US proxies with the teachings of “Islamic universities run by Green Zone Scholars under governments headed by pimps,” whose teachings advocated “weakness and humiliation.” Awlaki asserted that the “university of Somalia” would “graduate an alumni” of “fighters who are hardened by the field and ready to carry on with no fear and hesitation. It will provide its graduates with the hands-on experience that the ummah [the global Muslim community] greatly needs for its next stage. But their success depends on your support. It is the responsibility of the ummah to help them with men and money.”

Al Shabab replied to Awlaki’s message and Awlaki posted the answer on his site. Addressing him as “beloved Sheikh Anwar,” al Shabab’s statement said, “We look to you as one of the very few scholars who stand firm upon the truth and defend the honor of the Mujahideen and the Muslims by continuously uncovering the feeble plots of the enemies of Allah. Allah knows how many of the brothers and sisters have been affected by your work so we ask you to continue the important effort you are doing wherever you are and never to fear the blame of the blamers.” It concluded, “O Sheikh, we would not only look at you as only a soldier, but as the likes of Ibn Taymiya [an Islamic scholar known for resisting the Mongols in the thirteenth century].”

During the Israeli siege of Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead, which began in late 2008, Awlaki’s tone grew markedly more radical and warlike. “The illegal state of Israel needs to be eradicated. Just like Rasulullah drove them out of the Arabian peninsula the Jews of Palestine need to be driven out to the sea,” Awlaki wrote. “There are no Israeli civilians unless they are Muslim. When the enemy targets our women and children we should target theirs.”

Awlaki was influential among jihadist circles and with young, conservative Western Muslims, including those contemplating participating in the armed struggles against the United States and Israel and their proxies. His sermons had gone viral on jihadist web forums, which were heavily monitored by US intelligence. But there was no hard evidence presented that Awlaki had done anything that was not protected speech under the First Amendment to the US Constitution, or that would not require a major court battle to prove it was unconstitutional. There was, however, enough smoke around Awlaki for US intelligence to want him silenced, as he was during his eighteen months in a Yemeni prison. Now that Awlaki was out of jail and becoming more popular with every blog post, the digital surveillance on him intensified.

Unbeknownst to Awlaki, his e-mails were being intercepted and read, and his blog was being combed over for clues about his contacts. On December 17, 2008, the FBI intercepted an e-mail Awlaki received from Nidal Hasan, the army major whose parents had been members of Awlaki’s mosque in Virginia in 2001. The last contact Awlaki had with Hasan was before he left the United States for Yemen—and then it was only to speak with him at the request of his parents. In retrospect, the e-mail is ominous. “There are many soldiers in the us armed forces that have converted to Islam while in the service. There are also many Muslims who join the armed forces for a myriad of different reasons,” Hasan wrote Awlaki. “Some appear to have internal conflicts and have even killed or tried to kill other [US] soldiers in the name of Islam i.e. Hasan Akbar [a US soldier who was convicted of murdering two fellow soldiers in Kuwait], etc. Others feel that there is no conflict. Previous Fatwas seem vague and not very definitive.” He then asked Awlaki, “Can you make some general comments about Muslims in the [US] military. Would you consider someone like Hasan Akbar or other soldiers that have committed such acts with the goal of helping Muslims/Islam (Lets just assume this for now) fighting Jihad and if they did die would you consider them shaheeds [martyrs]. I realize that these are difficult questions but you seem to be one of the only ones that has lived in the [US who] has a good understanding of the Qur’an and Sunna and is not afraid of being direct.” Awlaki did not reply to that e-mail, but for months Hasan kept writing him.

Although federal investigators took no action against Hasan after that e-mail, a year later, after Hasan gunned down thirteen of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas, Hasan’s e-mails would help form part of the narrative that Awlaki was a terrorist. “Al-Awlaki condenses the Al Qaeda philosophy into digestible, well-written treatises,” Evan Kohlmann, a self-proclaimed al Qaeda scholar and popular “expert witness” at terror trials, told the New York Times. “They may not tell people how to build a bomb or shoot a gun. But he tells them who to kill, and why, and stresses the urgency of the mission.” Kohlmann was frequently brought in to brief the US government on al Qaeda—even though he did not speak Arabic and had done little traveling in any countries with a strong al Qaeda presence. Kohlmann briefed the US Justice Department and said he warned them of what he described as Awlaki’s increasing ability to incite young Westerners to join foreign jihads or to conduct terror attacks in their own countries. Kohlmann alleged that there should be “little surprise that Anwar al-Awlaki’s name and his sermon on ‘Constants on the Path of Jihad’ seem to surface in every single homegrown terrorism investigation, whether in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, or beyond.” He labeled “Constants” a “lecture that over time has become the ‘virtual bible’ for lone wolf Muslim extremists.”

Although Awlaki was undoubtedly grabbing the attention of an increasing number of counterterrorism officers and analysts in the United States, some within the intelligence community believed his importance was being inflated. Awlaki’s sermons were indeed popping up in a variety of terror investigations, but he was a virtual nobody in the world of actual al Qaeda cells. Outside of English-speaking Western Muslims, he was not influential in most parts of the Muslim world. “I think the reason we tend to focus on him so much, is because he preaches in English. And because of that, we have more exposure to what he says and because we have more exposure to what he says, we assume that he has more influence than he really does,” said Joshua Foust, who at the time was a Yemen analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Foust said he was concerned about Awlaki’s sermons influencing young Western Muslims, but he believed that some within the intelligence community were elevating the role his sermons played in terror plots. “I don’t see any evidence whatsoever that [Awlaki] poses some kind of ideological threat against the United States. I would say that 99.99 percent of the all the people who either listen to, or believe in Awlaki’s ideology, never act on it,” Foust told me. “So if you’re going to argue that ideology is what caused someone to do something, you need to actually—to me at least—to be intellectually honest and analytically rigorous. You need to explain why that ideology compelled that person to act, but it didn’t compel everyone who didn’t act to not act. And to me, I don’t think its possible to really explain that. I haven’t ever seen an argument that actually does that. So from the start, I think a lot of the focus on Awlaki doesn’t make any sense, because we assign him a kind of importance and influence that he doesn’t really have.”

From Awlaki’s perspective, he had been preaching a similar message for years before 9/11 and doing so in the United States. US Muslim “organizations used to support the Jihad in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Chechnya, and in Palestine. I was there, in America, at that time,” Awlaki recalled. “We used to call from the pulpits…for Jihad for the sake of Allah, the establishment of the Caliphate. Allegiance and Disavowal. We could speak freely. The freedom in America allowed us to say these things, and we had much more freedom than in many of the countries of the Islamic world.” Awlaki believed his message had not fundamentally changed, but the target of the jihad he advocated had. Lectures Awlaki had given advocating jihad in Chechnya or Afghanistan or Bosnia in the 1990s were on-message with US policy goals. A decade later, the same teachings—applied against the United States—took on a new meaning and cast Awlaki as a traitor to the country of his birth.

As 2008 drew to a close, Awlaki posted, “A New Year: Reality and Aspirations,” a blog in which he provided an analysis of various wars around the Islamic world and cited countries where Muslim mujahedeen were progressing against Western powers. In Iraq, Awlaki wrote, “The US has come to the conclusion that they cannot do the job alone and they must seek the assistance of the munafiqeen [hypocrites]. With all of the outside and inside forces combining efforts to fight the carriers of the truth in Iraq our brothers do not need to win in order to be victorious. All they need to do is hang on. If they succeed in that they are [winning]. The invader cannot stay there forever.” In Afghanistan, Awlaki asserted, “The mujahideen are winning, NATO are losing…. Obama is all hyped up about bringing an end to terrorism by focusing on Afghanistan. I pray the brothers teach him and his forces some good lessons this year.” Awlaki also celebrated al Shabab’s ascent in Somalia as “the best news of the year,” writing, “Al-Shabab are winning on all fronts. Insha Allah we should witness the announcement of the establishment of an Islamic emirate. Ethiopia is tired of fighting a proxy war on behalf of America.” Awlaki predicted that the United States would, once again, target Somalia, observing (presciently it would turn out), “The sea around Somalia is already occupied under the pretext of protection from piracy. This year could witness aerial bombardment with a renewed ground force invasion as a possibility.”

Globally, Awlaki asserted, “The separation of believers from hypocrites which precedes any Muslim victory is underway.” The “Jihad will carry on. And all of these are building stones for the ummah in its next stage. If Allah wants an end he prepares the means to it. Allah wants victory for this ummah and Allah is preparing the means for that. Let us not sit on the sidelines. Lets be part of that victory.” In some ways, Awlaki’s fixation on the Islamic players in an escalating global war of civilizations paralleled a different set of lists being secretly compiled by the Obama administration’s counterterrorist teams. On these lists were scores of al Qaeda leaders, as well as militants much further down the food chain: “facilitators,” “suspected militants,” “propagandists.” The administration was gearing up for a series of smaller wars in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, as well as a shift in strategy in Afghanistan that would seek to decapitate the Taliban leadership. At the center of Obama’s new strategy would be a targeted assassination program that fulfilled Rumsfeld’s vision of the world as a battlefield.

Awlaki predicted that the new US president would be a hawk against Islamic resistance movements. He was right. Obama would soon give carte blanche to JSOC and the CIA to wage a global manhunt. Capture was option two. Killing those whom the president deemed a threat to the United States was the primary mission, despite public assertions otherwise by military and government spokespeople. JSOC would not just be tasked with killing al Qaeda’s top leadership, but with decimating its support infrastructure, killing its way down the chain. It was through this program that Awlaki would find himself in the new president’s cross-hairs. He would soon become an American citizen sentenced to death with no trial.