Inside America's Dirty Wars
Jeremy Scahill April 24, 2013 | This article appeared in the May 13, 2013 edition of The Nation.
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After Abdulrahman [al-Awlaki] heard the news of Anwar’s death, he called home for the first time and spoke to his mother and grandmother. “That’s enough, Abdulrahman. You have to come back,” his grandmother Saleha told him. “That’s it.” The conversation was brief. Abdulrahman said he would return home soon, but that he wanted to wait for the roads to clear. There were police checkpoints and fighting along the route, and he did not want to be detained or caught up in any violence.
As Abdulrahman mourned, the boy’s family members in Shabwah tried to comfort him and encouraged him to get out with his cousins. That was what Abdulrahman was doing on the evening of October 14. He and his cousins had joined a group of friends outdoors to barbecue. There were a few other people doing the same nearby. It was about 9 pm when the drones pierced the night sky. Moments later, Abdulrahman was dead. So, too, were several other teenage members of his family, including Abdulrahman’s 17-year-old cousin Ahmed.
Early the next morning, Nasser al-Awlaki received a phone call from his family in Shabwah. “Some of our relatives went to the place where [Abdulrahman] was killed, and they saw the area…. And they told us he was buried with the others in one grave because they were blown up to pieces by the drone. So they could not put them in separate graves,” Nasser told me.
With the horror setting in that their eldest grandson had been killed just two weeks after their eldest child, Nasser and Saleha watched in disbelief as numerous news reports identified Abdulrahman as being 21 years old, with anonymous US officials referring to him as a “military-aged” male. Some reports intimated that he was an Al Qaeda supporter and that he had been killed while meeting with Ibrahim al-Banna, an Egyptian citizen described as the “media coordinator” for AQAP.
When I visited Nasser after Abdulrahman was killed, he showed me the boy’s Colorado birth certificate, which states that he was born in 1995 in Denver. “When he was killed by the US government, he was a teenager; he wasn’t 21. He wouldn’t have been able to enlist in the military in the US. He was 16,” Nasser told me. Days after the killing of Abdulrahman, the United States released a statement, as usual feigning ignorance about who was responsible for the strike, even though “unnamed officials” in the United States and Yemen had confirmed it. “We have seen press reports that AQAP senior official Ibrahim al-Banna was killed last Friday in Yemen and that several others, including the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, were with al-Banna at the time,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told the press, in a statement that strangely cast Abdulrahman as something between an Al Qaeda associate and a hapless tourist. “For over the past year, the Department of State has publicly urged US citizens not to travel to Yemen and has encouraged those already in Yemen to leave because of the continuing threat of violence and the presence of terrorist organizations, including AQAP, throughout the country.”
While the Awlakis opposed Anwar’s killing and believed that the United States had exaggerated its claims about his involvement with Al Qaeda, Nasser told me that his family understood why the United States wanted Anwar dead. “My son believed in what he did,” Nasser said, “but I am really distressed and disappointed by the killing, the brutal killing, of his son. He did nothing against the US. He was an American citizen. Maybe one day he would have gone to America to study and live there, and they killed him in cold blood.”
The CIA later claimed that it did not carry out the strike, asserting that the supposed target, al-Banna, was not on the agency’s hit list. That led to speculation that the attack that killed Abdulrahman and his relatives had been a JSOC strike. According to The Washington Post, senior US officials acknowledged that “the two kill lists don’t match, but offered conflicting explanations as to why.” The officials added that Abdulrahman was an “unintended casualty.” A JSOC official told me that the intended target was not killed in the strike, though he would not say who that was. On October 20, 2011, military officials presented a closed briefing on the strike to the Senate Armed Services Committee. With the exception of the statements from anonymous officials, the United States offered no public explanation for the attack. The mystery deepened when AQAP released a statement claiming that al-Banna was still alive. The Awlakis began to wonder if perhaps Abdulrahman was, in fact, the target of the strike.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid, one of the handful of US lawmakers who would have access to intelligence on the strike, seemed to suggest that this was the case when asked about the killing of the two Awlakis and Samir Khan. “I do know this,” he said on CNN, “the American citizens who have been killed overseas…are terrorists, and, frankly, if anyone in the world deserved to be killed, those three did deserve to be killed.”
Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary and a senior official in President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, was also asked about the strike that killed Abdulrahman. “It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process of law, without trial. And he’s underage. He’s a minor,” reporter Sierra Adamson said. Gibbs shot back: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don’t think becoming an Al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”
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