Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

  Stylistically, “Constants” is indistinguishable from Awlaki’s most innocuous CDs, and that may be the key to its impact. No histrionics signaled the shift. By 2005, many Muslims of various ages and ideological stripes knew his voice from his traditional sermons and his lectures on Islamic history; his boxed CD sets were in their glove compartments, and his calm storytelling made their commutes to work more tolerable. In other words, he was already in the door when his message grew more radical. His was a trusted voice with an evolving message, and the change resonated with many Muslims for whom the Iraq invasion and the excesses of the American campaign against terrorism had already planted seeds of doubt.

  Like most of Awlaki’s lecture series, “Constants” is not original work. It is Awlaki’s loose English translation of a post-9/11 treatise by Yusef al-Ayeri, a Saudi associate of Bin Laden who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and went by the nom de guerre “Swift Sword.” He helped found the Saudi branch of Al Qaeda, which would later become AQAP, argued in his writings that the Iraq invasion was a boon for jihad, and ran jihadi websites until May 2003, when he was killed by Saudi security forces. In his retelling, Awlaki trimmed some of the most obviously provocative details, including Ayeri’s references to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Whether the omissions represented residual doubts about endorsing Al Qaeda’s strategy or simply a wariness of provoking the authorities is uncertain. But his embrace of violent jihad was unequivocal. He ridiculed contemporary Muslims who condemned such attacks by saying, “There’s nothing in Islam that allows using violence”—though he had himself expressed that view after 9/11. To say such a thing simply to get along with the kuffar, or unbelievers, he said, was “compromising your religion.”

  To Ayeri’s dry text Awlaki brought his flair for storytelling. But he also sprinkled contemporary references through this mainly historical work, quoting Donald Rumsfeld, the American defense secretary, and U.S. News & World Report. He criticized the cowardice of Muslims who had enthusiastically supported the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan but who did not show the same fervor for fighting the Americans there. In religious terms, both were legitimate jihad, he said; the “hypocrites” were simply terrified of the United States. Westerners tried to use language to strip violence of its Islamic meaning, he said. “Whenever you see the word terrorist, replace it with the word mujahid,” Awlaki said. “Whenever you see the word terrorism, replace it with jihad. The only reason they’re not using the words mujahid and jihad is those are words in the Koran—so you can’t replace those.” He lauded Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian father of modern jihad who had been hanged in 1966 for plotting to assassinate Egypt’s president, as a martyr who, he said, “wrote with ink and blood.” He singled out for praise “martyrdom” attacks by Muslims who came from prosperous backgrounds, because “it completely destroys the theories of the kuffar” about such violence being motivated by suicidal despair, poverty, and oppression and “forces them to look at the true reason”—the defense of Islam.

  The central message of Ayeri’s work and Awlaki’s lectures was that Islam, like any religion, had both constants and variables. The first and most important constant was that “jihad will continue until the Day of Judgment” and thus (as the other constants elaborated) did not depend on any specific leader or place. This was Ayeri’s polemic against Muslim scholars who tried to set limits to jihad, suggesting that it might be suspended or dropped depending on the circumstances. The lectures also presaged Awlaki’s later call for homegrown, individual attacks, notably in Inspire magazine: by suggesting that jihad could not be limited by leaders or lands, he paved the way for the argument that devout Muslims in the West should not wait for orders before carrying out acts of jihad. Awlaki, channeling Ayeri, described jihad as the unceasing duty of every Muslim. “Giving up on the banner of jihad is defeat. What does the enemy want from us?” The enemy does not care about prayer or reading the Koran, Awlaki said. “What they’re asking from us today is one thing specifically: Stop jihad. No more jihad. If we give them what they want, then we have lost,” he said. “Any Muslim today who is not fighting jihad fe sabilillah,” Arabic for “jihad for the sake of Allah,” “is supporting the enemy by giving him this victory for free.” Any Muslim today, Awlaki said. His message, by 2005, was getting pretty hard to misunderstand.

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  Saeed Ali Obaid lived not far from the Awlaki family’s Rabat Street home. One night, unable to sleep, he rose at around 3 a.m. and walked to the neighborhood mosque to pray. The mosque was closed, but he called to the guard, who let him in. Inside, in the darkened prayer hall, Anwar al-Awlaki was leading about one hundred young men in prayer. Surprised, Obaid stepped into a corner and listened. He heard nothing radical, he said, but the scene was striking to him nonetheless. It suggested how large and organized Awlaki’s following had become and how careful he was to avoid too high a profile. “To me it was a training camp,” Obaid said. What Obaid saw as Awlaki’s American traits—his organization, punctuality, friendliness, skill at conflict resolution—all added to his appeal, he said.

  Early in 2006, a young Danish convert living in Sanaa was invited to the Awlaki home for a banquet. Morten Storm was a former biker-gang enforcer who had grown tired of his violent friends and discovered Islam in a public library, taken the name Murad Storm, and embraced the militant Salafism of Awlaki. “I warmed to him immediately,” Storm wrote in his memoir, an invaluable eyewitness account of Awlaki in his later years in Yemen. “He was urbane and well-informed, with a scholarly air and an undeniable presence. He exuded self-assurance without coming across as arrogant.” At one point in a pleasant evening, Awlaki’s ten-year-old son, Abdulrahman, born in Denver, came to consult his father about his homework. Storm remarked on the close bond between father and son and was impressed that Abdulrahman helped amuse Storm’s much younger son, despite the difference in their ages.

  Awlaki seemed to be trying to “tap into a wider pool of radicals in the Yemeni capital and beyond,” Storm wrote. Storm offered his own home in Sanaa for a weekly Islamic study circle at which Awlaki would teach a small, multinational group of devotees. “He loved being our mentor, seeing his every word absorbed,” Storm recalled. “Sitting cross-legged on the floor with notes in front of him, poised and eloquent, he liked to show off his intellect and learning, peering occasionally over his glasses at us.” But there were darker notes as well. Awlaki accused the FBI of leaking fabricated reports of his two arrests for soliciting prostitutes; in truth, the reports were not fabricated but documented in San Diego police records, and the FBI had kept secret his many visits to prostitutes in Washington, DC. “They did everything they could to humiliate me, to make me a laughingstock among Muslims,” Awlaki told Storm, by the Dane’s account. One night Awlaki lingered after the rest of the study group had left Storm’s house. “He fixed me with those dark eyes and said simply: ‘9/11 was justified,’ ” Storm recounted. If his account was accurate, Awlaki had traveled a long way since his bitter condemnation of 9/11 during the walk with his brother in New Mexico some four years earlier.

  Being “blocked” in his pursuit of a more conventional career, his uncle said, Awlaki channeled all his ambition into the role of a teacher and leader of devout young people, which he had tried out in the United States and mastered in Britain. “Because he did not have a job, he had more time to move and preach here and there, and he was very, very popular, very influential,” Bin Fareed said. If there had been fewer constraints on his message in Britain than in the United States, then in Yemen, a religiously conservative country with a long history of Islamic militancy, there was even greater acceptance of a worldview that portrayed Muslims as the victims of Western oppression and searched for contemporary answers in ancient religious doctrine. Mohammed al-Asaadi, the Observer editor, thought the interaction with young devotees may have pushed him toward extremism. “He found listening ears and open hearts for his speeches, sermons, and also his guidance,” said Asaadi, who remembered seeing Awlaki dri
ving around town in his SUV. “And wherever you find someone listening to you who would like to sacrifice his life for what you say, the natural human reaction would take it one step further.”

  While living in Sanaa in 2006, Awlaki stirred up family trouble by announcing that he was taking a second wife, a teenager whose brothers were among the cleric’s dedicated fans, Nabil and Tareq al-Dahab, the militant sons of a prominent tribe in northwest Yemen. By one account, they offered their sister to Awlaki as a kind of tribute to their idol; in any case, his decision was not taken well by either his first wife or his own westernized family, for whom polygamy was a vestige of older times. Awlaki set up his new wife in a separate apartment in Sanaa. Later, in 2008, he would take a third wife, a devout Muslim woman who had arrived from New Zealand, though she evidently became disenchanted and left Anwar and Yemen after just four months of marriage. His behavior recalled the compulsive sexual appetite that had driven Awlaki to risky assignations with prostitutes. And taking additional wives was unquestionably a step away from his American upbringing, an embrace of old Islamic custom.

  Yemeni authorities, under the eye of President Saleh, did pay close attention to what they were hearing about Awlaki from the American and British governments. Starting in 2003, as the Congressional Joint Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission examined the lingering mysteries involving the San Diego hijackers, the FBI came under criticism, privately and sometimes publicly, for failing to get to the bottom of Awlaki’s role. As early as September 2003, the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported that the FBI office at the America embassy in Yemen was looking for Awlaki; of course, it would not have been hard to find him, either at his family’s home or at well-publicized public appearances in Britain.

  Yemeni authorities called Awlaki in for questioning on several occasions, and he suspected American pressure was responsible, according to Asaadi, the editor. “He was telling me, ‘I’m not a person who would justify killing or who is in favor of killing—I am a Muslim. But the way they are harassing me, the way they are chasing me, the way they are liaising with the Yemeni authorities to detain me is something annoying, something disturbing,’ ” Asaadi said. “The more pressure he got from the authorities, the more radical he became.” By 2005, eyewitnesses recall seeing surveillance cars regularly parked outside the Awlaki family home on Rabat Street. Once again Awlaki was being watched, and this time there was little effort at discretion. “I saw someone outside the house chewing qat in his taxi at 3 a.m.,” said a former neighbor, speaking of the ubiquitous leaves chewed for their mild stimulant effect by most Yemenis. “I said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ‘Chewing qat,’ he said.”

  The FBI had staked out a position during the 9/11 investigations that Awlaki was neither a conspirator in the plot nor a significant threat—a position that, of course, helped them defend their failure both before and after 9/11 to fully probe his connections. The bureau formally closed its Awlaki investigation in May 2003 “for lack of evidence of a pattern of activity suggesting international terrorism.” In July 2004, when the bureau got a tip of some kind on Awlaki (the exact nature of the tip is redacted from public documents), officials decided not to pursue it. “ANWAR AWLAKI is no longer in San Diego Division and is believed to be out of the country. No interview will be conducted.”

  But in January 2006, an FBI source reported that Awlaki had just crossed the border from Canada into Vermont, and the bureau’s Washington Field Office opened a new investigation. It was a bogus tip, as agents soon discovered—Anwar was leading a busy life in Sanaa. Nonetheless, with his recording of “Constants on the Path of Jihad” making the Internet rounds and turning up in terrorism investigations, counterterrorism agents decided to keep the file open. The next month, concerns about the threat from Yemen were rekindled when at least twenty-three Al Qaeda operatives escaped from the Political Security Organization’s maximum-security prison in Sanaa in a jailbreak widely suspected of having inside help. So in April 2006, the new case was transferred to the FBI’s San Diego office, which had first looked into Awlaki in 1999–2000, and files covering both eavesdropping and surveillance on Awlaki were transferred there from Washington. Clearly, the bureau was worried about a cleric who was openly endorsing violent jihad and carrying a US passport.

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  Perhaps it was a coincidence. But eight months after the FBI reopened its investigation, Yemeni authorities made the unusual decision to act against this son of a prominent family. Awlaki was arrested in Sanaa, along with two other Yemenis, and imprisoned about three miles away from his family’s house at the Political Security Organization’s prison, where the 2006 jailbreak had occurred. The prison was a sprawling complex just below the parched brown hills that seemed to merge without a clear boundary into the stone buildings of the capital. It occupied several city blocks, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, protected from suicide bombers with police roadblocks and tire shredders. Anwar’s parents were horrified, and his father and uncle immediately began to lobby their government contacts, up to President Saleh, to get him released.

  Nominally, at least, his arrest on August 31, 2006, resulted from his intervention in a tribal dispute over a kidnapping. Though the kidnapping case might appear to have been just a pretext for the authorities to get him off the streets, Awlaki’s father confirmed that it was the real reason for his arrest, and Awlaki himself later told AQAP’s media wing that he was taken into custody because of “a local accusation.” News reports later linked Awlaki, under the pseudonym Abu Atiq, to a thwarted September 2006 Al Qaeda plot to attack oil installations in Marib and Hadramout provinces. Separately, Yemeni press reports linked the man called Abu Atiq to a group of eight foreigners who were arrested in October 2006 and accused of running guns to militants in Somalia. In his eighteen months of imprisonment, however, Awlaki was never charged with a crime, and it remains uncertain whether those accusations had any merit.

  Whatever the real reason for his arrest, Yemeni authorities, with their usual wary eye on American counterterrorism dollars, soon consulted John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. In effect, the Yemenis told Negroponte: We are holding an American citizen who has been linked to the 9/11 hijackers and whose name keeps surfacing in America. What do you want us to do with him? Negroponte told the Yemeni officials that the United States did not object to his detention, according to American and Yemeni officials.

  Word soon got around among Muslim activists in the West. The British group Cageprisoners, founded by a British citizen formerly imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Moazzam Begg, sent out a notice that got wide circulation: “A respected scholar, Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, has been arrested in Yemen. This deeply saddens many of us, especially those who have widely benefited from his lectures and courses on tapes and CDs, and during his visits to the UK.” The appeal, urging a letter-writing campaign, said that Awlaki “may be subject to injustices and torture.”

  A legend would later arise that Awlaki was moderate in his views until he was arrested and physically tortured in the Sanaa prison. While torture in custody was not unusual in Yemen, Awlaki never publicly mentioned ill treatment. His father, who visited him in prison and heard his account afterward, said he was never beaten or physically tortured, quite possibly because of the prominence of his family. By Awlaki’s own account, for more than sixteen months of his eighteen-month incarceration, he was kept in solitary confinement—a form of isolation that, while used in many American prisons, is considered by many human rights activists to be a form of psychological torture. During the second half of his imprisonment, authorities permitted weekly visits from his family. In any case, Awlaki’s evolution to more and more radical views and his endorsement of violence clearly had begun long before his 2006 arrest.

  Prison appears to have had a profound effect on him, in part because it allowed ample time for study and contemplation. In Awlaki’s later account, in interviews and on the blog he started after his release, his incarceration becam
e almost a blessing. This may have been self-dramatizing on his part, or a reluctance to give his captors the satisfaction of knowing they had made him suffer, but it has the ring of truth. Prison held the promise of transforming a thirty-five-year-old man who had, in fact, been a bit lost—the prostitutes, the failed business schemes, the pressure from family to be something other than an imam—into an authentic Islamic hero, a martyr suffering for his faith like many of the most famous figures in the history of the religion. The Prophet himself had been celebrated for his asceticism. Awlaki now seemed to relish his own physical deprivation.

  If the move from Washington to London had narrowed his world mainly to like-thinking religious fundamentalists, now his world narrowed still further, quite literally. His first nine months in prison, he said later, were spent alone in a bare, eight-by-four-foot basement cell illuminated by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling that was on twenty-four hours a day. He slept on a two- to three-inch-thick mattress on the floor and had a plate, a water bottle, and another bottle for urination, he said. He was allowed no visitors and no contact with other inmates, and he could speak to the guards “in whispers and only for urgent needs.” But he was also given a Koran. “In this environment,” he wrote on his blog after his release, “there is nothing to do and nothing to read but the Quran, and that is when the Quran reveals its secrets,” when it “literally overwhelms the heart.” He would “recite it with eagerness for hours” and “never lose my concentration.” His recitation, he wrote, “would carry me outside of this world and I would completely forget about my situation until a warden would slam the door open for restroom time or to take me for interrogation.”