Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

37. Driving Anwar Awlaki to Hell

YEMEN, 2010—In early February 2010, AQAP leader Said Ali al Shihri, whom the Yemenis had claimed to have killed multiple times, released an audiotape. “We advise you, our people in the Peninsula, to prepare and carry your weapons and to defend your religion and yourselves and to join your mujahideen brothers,” he declared, adding that US “espionage planes,” presumably drones, had been killing women and children.

On March 14, the United States struck again. Air strikes hit Abyan in southern Yemen, killing two alleged AQAP operatives, including its southern chief, Jamil al Anbari. As it did after the al Majalah bombing, Yemen took credit for a US attack while Washington remained silent. AQAP leader Qasim al Rimi confirmed the deaths in an audio recording released soon after the strikes. “A US strike targeted our brother,” he declared. “The attack was carried out while our brother Jamil was making a phone call via the Internet.” As for Yemen’s claims to have carried out the strike, Rimi said, “This nonsense is similar to their allegations” in the December 2009 strikes. “May God disgrace lying and liars.” A few months later, AQAP would avenge the deaths by launching a brazen attack against a government security compound in Aden, killing eleven people. The claim of responsibility was signed: “Brigade of the martyr Jamil al-Anbari.”

A week after the March 14 strike, one of the key US officials running the Obama administration’s covert war in Yemen, Michael Vickers, accompanied then-undersecretary of defense for intelligence James Clapper for talks with President Saleh and other Yemeni officials. The US Embassy released a brief statement on the meeting, saying only that they were there “to discuss the ongoing counterterrorism cooperation” between the two countries and “to express the appreciation of the United States for Yemen’s continuing efforts to counter” AQAP. A month later, Vickers gave a closed-door briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee on covert US action in Yemen and Somalia. An internal e-mail circulated within Vickers’s office at the time, and provided to me in confidence, acknowledged that “a task force operating in Yemen has helped Yemeni forces kill terrorism suspects, but it has also carried out unilateral operations,” adding: “The intelligence community, including the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency vets the lists of targets and decides who needs to be captured for the purposes of intelligence collection, or who can be killed.”

While JSOC forces continued to operate inside Yemen, at times training Yemeni forces and, at others, conducting kinetic actions, the air strikes continued. In late May, General James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, briefed President Obama on a High Value Target that JSOC had a lock on. The president green-lit a strike. On May 24, a US missile hit a convoy of vehicles in the Marib Desert that “actionable intelligence” had concluded was heading to a meeting of al Qaeda operatives. The intelligence was only partly correct. The men inside the vehicle were not al Qaeda members but prominent Yemeni local mediators in the government effort to demilitarize members of AQAP. Among those killed was Jabir al Shabwani, the deputy governor of Marib Province. Shabwani was in a key position to negotiate, given that his cousin Ayad was the local AQAP leader whom US and Yemeni forces had tried to take out in a pair of strikes in January. Shabwani’s uncle and two of his escorts were also killed in the attack. A local official said the “deputy governor was on a mediation mission to persuade al-Qaeda elements to hand themselves over to the authorities.”

As in the cases of the other US strikes, the Yemeni authorities took public responsibility, and Yemen’s Supreme Security Council apologized for what it said was a government raid gone wrong. But this hit came with much higher stakes because the attack killed one of their own people. Within hours of the attack, Shabwani’s tribe attacked the main oil pipeline running from Marib to the Ras Isa port on the Red Sea coast. The tribesmen also attempted to take over the presidential palace in the province but were repelled by Yemeni army forces and tanks. Yemeni lawmakers demanded that Saleh’s government explain how the strike happened and who was really behind the widening aerial war in Yemen.

Months after the attack, some US officials began to believe that the Saleh regime had actually fed the United States bad intelligence to take out Shabwani, after a political feud had broken out between Jabir al Shabwani and “key members” of President Saleh’s family. “We think we got played,” a US source with access to “high-level” Obama administration discussions on Yemen said. The White House, the US military and the US ambassador to Yemen had all approved the strike. “It turned out you didn’t really know who was at all those [Yemeni] meetings,” a former US intelligence official told the Wall Street Journal. A former US official told the paper the strike showed that the United States was “too susceptible to the Yemenis saying, ‘Oh, that’s a bad guy, you go get him.’ And it’s a political bad guy—it’s not a real bad, bad guy.” Brennan was reportedly “pissed” about the strike. “How could this have happened?” Obama later demanded of General Cartwright. The general told him it was bad intel from the Yemenis. Cartwright said he “got a pretty good chest-thumping from the commander-in-chief.”

After the Tomahawk cruise missile strikes that killed scores of civilians in al Majalah in December 2009 and the disastrous strike that killed Shabwani, the CIA began agitating for a shift from JSOC’s Tomahawk strikes to the CIA’s weapon of choice: drones. Surveillance satellites were repositioned, and more Predator drones were deployed in secret bases near Yemen. “The drones are flying over Marib every twenty-four hours and there is not a day that passes that we don’t see them,” said Sheikh Ibrahim al Shabwani, another brother of the government mediator who was killed in the May 25 strike. “Occasionally they fly at a lower altitude while at other times they fly at a higher altitude. The atmosphere has become weary because of the presence of US drones and fear that they could strike at any time.” Stoking such insecurity seemed a central part of the emerging US strategy aimed at making it lethally dangerous for local tribes to support AQAP. But to some it seemed to be backfiring, particularly with local tribal leaders who often had family members on various sides of the war.

Some reports alleged that, far from having intended to get Shabwani killed, Saleh, who depended on tribes to support his regime, demanded a pause in US covert actions as a result of the strike. But US officials insisted that it did not shake the covert arrangement allowing the United States to strike inside Yemen. “At the end of the day, it’s not like he said, ‘No more,’” an unnamed Obama administration official told the New York Times. “He didn’t kick us out of the country.”

What cannot be disputed is that the strikes, especially those that killed civilians and important tribal figures, were giving valuable ammunition to al Qaeda for its recruitment campaign in Yemen and its propaganda battle against the US-Yemen counterterrorism alliance. Yemeni government officials said the series of US strikes from December 2009 to May 2010 had killed more than two hundred civilians and forty people affiliated with al Qaeda. “It is incredibly dangerous what the US is trying to do in Yemen at the moment because it really fits into AQAP’s broader strategy, in which it says Yemen is not different from Iraq and Afghanistan,” asserted Princeton professor Gregory Johnsen in June 2010, after Amnesty International released a report documenting the use of US munitions in the Yemen strikes. “They are able to make the argument that Yemen is a legitimate front for jihad,” said Johnsen, who in 2009 served as a member of USAID’s conflict assessment team for Yemen. “They’ve been making that argument since 2007, but incidents like this are all sort of fodder for their argument.”

In the summer of 2010, after months of sustained US and Yemeni air strikes and raids, AQAP hit back. In June, a group of AQAP operatives dressed in military uniforms carried out a bold raid on the Aden division of Yemen’s secret police, the Political Security Organization (PSO). During an early morning flag ceremony at the compound, the operatives launched rocket-propelled grenades and opened fire with automatic weapons as they stormed the gates. They gunned down at least ten security officers and three cleaning women. The purpose of the raid was to free suspected militants being held by the PSO, and it was successful. That raid was followed by a sustained assassination campaign during the summer aimed at high-level Yemeni military and intelligence officials. During the holy month of Ramadan, which began in August, AQAP launched a dozen attacks. By September as many as sixty officials had been killed, with a substantial number shot dead by assassins riding on motorcycles. The method of attack became so common that the government actually banned motorcycles in urban areas in Abyan. The use of “motorbikes in terrorist operations to assassinate intelligence officers and security personnel” has “massively mounted over the past nine months in the province,” said a Yemeni Interior Ministry official.

As Yemen’s government found itself under siege and US covert actions expanded, Anwar Awlaki released a “Message to the American People.” In the speech, Awlaki said that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to bring down the airplane over Detroit was “in retaliation to American cruise missiles and cluster bombs that killed women and children,” and he declared, “You have your B-52’s, your Apaches, your Abrams and your cruise missiles, and we have small arms and simple improvised explosive devices. But we have men, who are dedicated and sincere, with hearts of lions.” Awlaki also launched into a diatribe against the US and Saleh governments. If “Bush is remembered as being the President who got America stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s looking like Obama wants to be remembered as the President who got America stuck in Yemen,” Awlaki declared. He said:

What was remarkable about Awlaki’s statement on the US relationship with Saleh was how true it rang to many veteran Yemen analysts. During this time, Awlaki began to achieve almost mythical status in the US media and government narrative on terrorist threats. But the real question was how big a threat he actually posed. Although the dispute did not play out publicly, there was deep division in the intelligence community over how to approach Awlaki. There was abundant evidence that he had praised attacks against the United States after the fact and had been in touch with Hasan and Abdulmutallab. There was also evidence that he called for violent jihad against the United States and its allies. But there was no conclusive evidence presented, at least not publicly, that Awlaki had played an operational role in any attacks.

In October 2009, the CIA had reportedly concluded that “the agency lacked specific evidence that he threatened the lives of Americans—which is the threshold for any capture-or-kill operation” against an American citizen. President Obama now disagreed with that assessment. Awlaki would have to die.

IN FEBRUARY 2010, journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye once again managed to find Awlaki and conducted the first interview with the American citizen since the news of his threatened assassination at the hands of the US government was made public. “Why do you think the Americans want to kill you?” Shaye asked Awlaki. “Because I am a Muslim and I promote Islam,” Awlaki responded, adding that the allegations against him—in the media, not in a court of law—were based around the idea that he had “incited” Nidal Hasan and Abdulmutallab and that his taped teachings had been found in the possession of accused conspirators in more than a dozen alleged terror plots. “All this comes as part of the attempt to liquidate the voices that call for defending the rights of the Umma [the global Muslim community].” He added: “We call for the Islam that was sent by Allah to Prophet Muhammad, the Islam of jihad and Sharia ruling. Any voice that calls for this Islam, they either kill the person or the character; they kill the person by murdering or jailing them, or they kill the character by distorting their image in the media.”

Shaye asked Awlaki, “Do you think Yemen’s government would facilitate your assassination?”

“The Yemeni government sells its citizens to the United States, to earn the ill-gotten funds it begs the West for in return for their blood. The Yemeni officials tell the Americans to strike whatever they want and ask them not to announce responsibility for the attacks to avoid people’s rage, and then the Yemeni government shamelessly adopts these attacks,” Awlaki replied. “The people of Shabwah, Abyan and Arhab have seen the Cruise missiles, and some people saw cluster bombs that did not explode. The state lies when it claims responsibility, and it does so to deny collaboration. US drones continuously fly over Yemen. What state is that which allows its enemy to spy on its people and then considers it as ‘accepted cooperation’?”

In Yemen, Awlaki was now completely underground and was having difficulty posting any sermons. His blog had been shut down by the US government, and drones hovered in the skies over Shabwah. While US media outlets, terror “experts” and prominent government officials were identifying Awlaki as a leader of AQAP, those allegations were dubious. Awlaki had entered dangerous territory in openly praising terrorist attacks on the United States and calling for Muslims in America to follow the example of Nidal Hasan. But the available evidence regarding al Qaeda’s relationship with Awlaki in 2010 suggests that Awlaki was not an operational member of the group but was seeking out an alliance with like-minded individuals. Some, like his uncle, even argued that he was pushed into an alliance with AQAP after he was marked for death alongside its leaders.

Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed had been Anwar’s protector in Yemen. It was bin Fareed’s tribal leadership that allowed Awlaki safe passage through Shabwah and other tribal areas. But the sheikh was under great pressure from the Yemeni regime to bring in Anwar. Awlaki’s father, Nasser, was convinced that Anwar would remain in hiding and that the US government would continue to try to kill him. Bin Fareed decided to give it one more try. He went to visit Anwar in Shabwah. When he arrived, he said he saw drones “circling our valley twenty-four hours—not one minute they were stopped. Of course we see them when the sun is out—but we can hear them very clearly. And they were after, I think, Anwar,” he told me.

When bin Fareed met his nephew, Anwar told him that he had heard that Obama had marked him for death. “In Sana’a now, I think they are under pressure,” bin Fareed told Anwar. “Now the president gave the order that they either capture you or kill you.” Awlaki told bin Fareed that he had not been charged with any crime by the US government and would not turn himself in to face charges that didn’t exist. “You tell them, I have nothing, until today, I have nothing to do with al Qaeda,” Anwar told his uncle. “But if [Obama] will not withdraw his [order], and I am wanted, maybe they’ll drive me to hell. I have no choice.”

Bin Fareed told me he believed that the threats against Anwar inadvertently drove him closer to AQAP. “Of course, we realized that [Anwar] had no choice. And really, they did drive him to hell.” The announcement by the US government that Anwar was marked for death, bin Fareed told me, “was a very, very big mistake.”

On May 23, 2010, al Qaeda’s media wing in Yemen, al Malaeim, released a video titled “The First and Exclusive Meeting with Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki.” In the video, Awlaki thanked his interviewer, a bearded man dressed in all white, for “taking all these pains in order to reach here.” Awlaki was dressed in traditional Yemeni garb, sitting before a bookshelf filled with religious books. On his waist was a jambiya dagger, a tribal symbol worn by many men in Yemen. In the interview, Awlaki praised a recent speech given by al Qaeda’s number-two man, Ayman al Zawahiri, but also referred to “you people in Al Qaeda” and did not claim to be a member of the group. The interviewer, who repeatedly thanked him for giving them an “exclusive” interview, did not address Awlaki as a fellow member of al Qaeda.

The interviewer for this al Qaeda propaganda video was remarkably direct, asking Awlaki many questions about the targeting of civilians, his relationship with Nidal Hasan and Abdulmutallab and his interpretation of various fatwas. He also asked Awlaki about the reports that he had been targeted. Speaking in Arabic, Awlaki told the interviewer, “It is not true that I am a fugitive. I move around among my tribesmen and in other parts of Yemen because the people of Yemen hate the Americans, and support the people of truth and the oppressed. I move around among the Aulaq tribe, and I get support from wide sectors of the people in Yemen.” Awlaki praised various mujahedeen movements across the globe, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Somalia. “To the Muslims in general and to the inhabitants of the Peninsula especially, we should participate in this Jihad against America,” he said.

Awlaki was undoubtedly developing an affinity for al Qaeda’s principles—and his public remarks were becoming indistinguishable from the pronouncements of al Qaeda. Still, words are not actions. To former DIA analyst Joshua Foust, it appeared as though some within the US intelligence community were elevating Awlaki’s status based on the fear he was able to inspire through his words. Although he found Awlaki’s praise for al Qaeda and calls for terrorist attacks against the United States reprehensible, Foust did not believe these statements constituted evidence of a senior operational role in al Qaeda. “Within AQAP itself, he’s literally middle management,” he told me at the time. “Even the AQAP leadership treats him like he’s just a subordinate, who needs to shut up and do what he’s told.” Foust added: “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.”

After the Christmas Day bomb plot, the White House changed its tune on Awlaki, claiming he had gone operational, with some officials comparing him to Osama bin Laden. “I think it’s an exaggeration, frankly, to think he is necessarily a new bin Laden,” Nakhleh, the former senior CIA officer, told me. “We would not have even thought much about him if it weren’t for Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber.”

Although Awlaki was developing relationships with various al Qaeda figures in Shabwah and elsewhere, and his status was rising within its ranks, well-connected Yemenis who had interviewed AQAP leaders told me that he was not an operational member of the group. “Anwar al Awlaki was not a leader in al Qaeda, he did not hold any official post at all,” said journalist Abdul Rezzaq al Jamal. He told me that AQAP viewed Awlaki as an ally and that “the thing that united him and al Qaeda is the hostility to the US.” Awlaki “agrees with al Qaeda in vision, rationale and strategies. The efforts that were made by Awlaki in the framework of AQAP’s work, especially in terms of recruiting in the West, were very big.”

Nasser Awlaki acknowledged that his son was beginning to refer to members of al Qaeda as “my brothers” in interviews, but he did not believe his son was a member of AQAP. “He never said that he was member of al Qaeda,” he told me, speculating that “maybe in ideology, maybe Anwar came to believe in some of the ideas of al Qaeda, that you cannot take back your land by peaceful means, you have to fight for it. Anybody who attacks you, you have to defend yourself.” Nasser added, “Anwar is a very courageous man. I tell you, definitely, I know my son. If he was a member of that organization, he will have no problems to say it.” After all, having already been marked for death by the United States, he had nothing to lose.

Even members of Yemen’s government were concerned that the United States was inflating Awlaki’s status as a terrorist leader. Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al Qirbi, told reporters in Sana’a, “Anwar al-Awlaki has always been looked at as a preacher rather than a terrorist and shouldn’t be considered as a terrorist unless the Americans have evidence that he has been involved in terrorism.”

Awlaki had not been charged with any crimes by the US government. Nor had the Americans publicly offered any evidence that Awlaki was the AQAP ringleader they made him out to be. Awlaki’s case would cut to the heart of one of the key questions raised by the increasing role targeted assassinations were playing in US foreign policy: Could the American government assassinate it own citizens without due process?