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.”
The author in Gardez, Afghanistan, walking with survivors of a deadly US night raid conducted in February 2010. Two pregnant women were killed, along with an Afghan police commander and several others.
Afghan police commander Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin (fourth from the left) standing with American soldiers. Daoud was killed by US Special Operations Forces in a night raid based on faulty intelligence. He had long fought the Taliban and had been trained by the US.
Admiral William McRaven, then JSOC commander, visited Gardez, Afghanistan, in March 2010, a month after a botched US night raid.
Hajji Sharabuddin, whose family members were killed in the night raid in Gardez, holds a picture of his two sons who died in the raid. “I don’t accept their apology,” he said. “Americans not only destroyed my house, they destroyed my family.”
Afghan forces who accompanied McRaven offered to sacrifice a sheep to ask for forgiveness for the deaths caused by the night raid.
Mohamed Afrah Qanyare was one of the first Somali warlords contracted by the CIA after 9/11 to hunt down people on the US kill list. “America knows war,” he said. “They are war masters.”
The Mogadishu Cathedral, built in 1928 when Somalia was under Italian colonial rule, now lies in ruins. Since 2002, US-backed warlords have battled Islamic militias for control of Somalia.
Somali warlord Yusuf Mohammed Siad, known as “Indha Adde” (White Eyes), controls large sections of Mogadishu. Once an ally of al Qaeda, he now fights on the US side against al Shabab. “If we capture a foreigner, we execute them so that others will see we have no mercy,” he said.
The author on the front lines near Mogadishu’s Bakaara market in June 2011.
Dr. Nasser Awlaki at his home in Sana’a, Yemen. After his son, US citizen Anwar Awlaki, was put on the kill list, he filed a lawsuit in an effort to save his son’s life. He wrote a personal letter to President Obama asking him to “reconsider your order to kill...my son.”
Nasser Awlaki holding his first son, Anwar, who was born in New Mexico in 1971. Anwar “was an all-American boy,” he said.
In 2001, Anwar Awlaki was the imam at a large mosque in Virginia. After 9/11, Awlaki was interviewed frequently by US media outlets and offered commentary on the experience of American Muslims. He was frequently described as a moderate voice. Awlaki said the 9/11 attackers had “perverted their religion.”
In early 2010, Awlaki was identified as being on the US kill list. His sermons had become increasingly radical, and he embraced the very identity he once professed to oppose. “I eventually came to the conclusion that Jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other able Muslim,” Awlaki declared. Awlaki became the first known US citizen to be targeted for assassination by his own government.
CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot two Pakistanis in Lahore in 2011. He was arrested by Pakistani authorities but eventually freed after the victims’ families were forced to accept a payment of “blood money.” Many Pakistanis rallied, calling for him to be executed.
Admiral William McRaven, who led the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, with President Barack Obama at Fort Campbell in Kentucky days after the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Since 2001, McRaven has been one of the key US officials running the targeted killing program.
Part of the US missile that hit the Yemeni village of al Majalah on December 17, 2009. In all, more than forty people were killed, including fourteen women and twenty-one children. The Yemeni government took responsibility for the strike, alleging it was a successful attack on an al Qaeda training camp.
Muqbal, a tribal leader from al Majalah, Yemen. “If they kill innocent children and call them al Qaeda, then we are all al Qaeda,” he said. “If children are terrorists, then we are all terrorists.”
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye was imprisoned soon
after he exposed the US cruise missile attack on al Majalah and interviewed Anwar Awlaki. After the Yemeni president decided to pardon him, President Obama personally intervened and the pardon was rescinded.
Posters demanding Shaye’s release were hung throughout Sana’a. His trial was roundly condemned as a sham by human rights and media freedom groups.
Then-JSOC commander Admiral William McRaven with Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sana’a in October 2009.
Abdulrahman Awlaki’s birth certificate, showing he was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1995. Anwar Awlaki’s eldest son, he lived with his grandparents after his father went underground in 2009.
Abdulrahman Awlaki, a sixteen-year-old US citizen, was killed in a US drone strike on October 14, 2011. His father had been assassinated two weeks earlier. Abdulrahman was eating dinner with his teenage cousin and some friends when he was killed. The US government has never explained his death.
A young girl who survived the December 2009 US missile strike in al Majalah, Yemen.
A young girl at an anti-Saleh protest before Friday prayers in Sana’a.
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:
Obama has already started his war on Yemen, by the aerial bombings of Abyan and Shabwah. By doing that he has waged a publicity campaign for the Mujahideen in Yemen, and within days accomplished for them the work of years....The corrupt Yemeni government officials and some of the tribal chiefs who claim to be your allies are having a ball these days. The word being passed around among them is that this is the time to extort the gullible American. Your politicians, military and intelligence officers are being milked for millions. The Yemeni government officials are giving you big promises and handing you big bills: welcome to the world of Yemeni politicians.
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.”
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