Anwar al-Awlaki

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Anwar al-Awlaki in October 2008

Anwar al-Awlaki (also written Aulaqi ; Arabic أنور العولقي, DMG Anwar al-ʿAwlaqī ; * April 22, 1971 in Las Cruces , New Mexico , USA ; † September 30, 2011 in Yemen ) was an Islamist extremist and imam with US and Yemeni citizenship .

Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in 2011 in a targeted air strike by a US drone used by the CIA in northern Yemen. His 16-year-old son was killed in the same manner two weeks later, and his eight-year-old daughter was shot dead by US forces in 2017.

Life and activities

Anwar Al-Awlaki was born the son of wealthy Yemeni immigrants in Las Cruces in the US state of New Mexico . In 1978, when he was seven years old, his family returned to Yemen . He lived and attended school in his parents' home country for over 11 years before returning to the United States. At Colorado State University , he began studying civil engineering in 1991 , which he completed in 1994 with a bachelor's degree. In the same year he married a cousin from Yemen and began working as a part-time minister in Denver . From 1996 to 2000 he was imam of a mosque in San Diego, California . As early as 1999, he was observed by the FBI because of potential contacts with Hamas , which, however, did not find sufficient evidence for legal action. In 2000, Al-Awlaki made a world tour and returned in January 2001. There he took a job as a preacher in a mosque in Falls Church near Washington .

From 2002 to 2004 Al-Awlaki stayed in Great Britain , where he drew attention to himself with some radical sermons. He finally returned to Yemen in early 2004 and settled in the Shabva region with his wife and five children . He was held there from 2006 to 2007, presumably under pressure from the United States, which contributed to his radicalization.

In March 2010, Anwar al-Awlaki called for jihad (“holy war”) against the United States. "After the continued aggression against Muslims," ​​he was obliged to do so, he said. He accused the Muslims living in the United States of being opportunistic .

In May 2010 he called on all Muslims in the US armed forces to kill comrades who were on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan. As a model, he named the American officer Nidal Malik Hasan , who shot 13 members of the US Army in the rampage in Fort Hood .

In June 2010, he issued a fatwa on the killing of Molly Norris and other cartoonists , including for involvement in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day . On the advice of the FBI , Molly Norris went into hiding.

On January 17, 2011, he was sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison for appeals to kill foreigners in Yemen. The occasion was the trial of a Yemeni security guard who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a French employee of an energy company. Anwar al-Awlaki had encouraged this security guard in months of correspondence to kill foreigners. He was also accused of belonging to an "armed gang". A relative of his, Othman al Aulaqi , was sentenced to eight years in prison on the same charges.

The British VHF broadcaster Imam FM broadcast 25 hours of lectures by al-Awlaki in 2017. The plan was to broadcast his lectures for one to two hours a day throughout Ramadan. It was an oversight, but one cannot guarantee that it will not repeat itself, the broadcaster said. The regulatory authority Ofcom then permanently withdrew Imam FM's broadcasting license.

Social websites and radio sermons

With his own blog and Facebook page, he was known as the “ Bin Laden of the Internet”. He was reportedly promoted to the rank of regional commander within al-Qaeda in 2009; however, less on an operational level than on an inspiring level.

Persecution and death

In April 2010 it became known that al-Awlaki was the first US citizen since 2001 to be placed on a CIA list of the most wanted extremists, who are on the list for arrest or killing. The release to a targeted killing of a US citizen under the Obama administration has been described in the press as an "unprecedented event". On 5 May 2011, an attempt it in a remote part of Yemen with a failed drone of the US Air Force to kill.

Anwar al-Awlaki's father Nasser al-Awlaki , former Yemen's Agriculture Minister, tried with a team of Yemeni and US lawyers to get a federal court in the US to ban the targeted killing of his son because it was illegal and the constitution of the country United States disagree. Anwar is also entitled to a fair trial.

At the end of September 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki was killed along with another US citizen and Islamist extremist, Samir Khan , and two other people in a drone attack with Hellfire missiles in Yemen. Anwar al-Awlaki was on a "death list" drawn up by a secret subcommittee of the National Security Council . The attack was authorized in a secret memorandum by Attorney General Eric Holder . The memorandum was published in 2014.

Al-Awlaki's whereabouts were identified by a courier who was in contact with the double agent Morten Storm of the Danish secret service Politiets Efterretningstjeneste .

Al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was also a US citizen, was killed two weeks later, on October 14, 2011, in another drone attack in Yemen. US officials said he was not the target of the attack, but was a victim of it because he was in the company of the target, an al-Qaida leader. The American journalist Jeremy Scahill made massive allegations against the Obama administration in connection with the drone killing of this 16-year-old youth, which he described as a serious crime.

On January 29, 2017, SEALs from Team 6 of the Joint Special Operations Command shot and killed the eight-year-old daughter of al-Awlaki, Nawar (also "Nora") in the mountain village of Jakla in the governorate of al-Baida ' - she was also an American citizen. The military action was the first secret commando operation ordered by US President Trump , and it was the third such US ground operation in Yemen. The US Department of Defense admitted that "almost everything went wrong" in the operation. 14 fighters and numerous civilians were killed, as well as an American soldier. The girl's grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, told NBC News that there were 59 deaths. Military informants reported that at least 15 women and children had been killed. The attack was aimed at houses, a school, a mosque and a medical facility that were also used by suspected AQAP fighters. The Jakla village was largely destroyed. The girl was seriously injured with a shot in the neck and then bled to death in his home within two hours. Al-Awlaki's brother-in-law was also killed in the attack. Karen Joy Greenberg , director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University , said the girl's death was a gift to all al-Qaida propagandists: "The perception will be that killing al-Awlaki is not enough that the USA had to kill the whole family ”.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Felisa Cardona: US attorney defends dropping radical cleric's case in 2002 In: The Denver Post , December 3, 2009 (English).
  2. ↑ Michelle Shephard: The powerful online voice of jihad. In: Toronto Star , October 18, 2009 (English).
  3. ^ A b Mark Mazzetti , Eric Schmitt, Robert F. Worth: Two-Year Manhunt Led to Killing of Awlaki in Yemen. In: The New York Times , September 30, 2011.
  4. ↑ Aamer Madhani: Cleric al-Awlaki dubbed 'bin Laden of the Internet In: USA Today , September 30, 2011 (English).
  5. ^ Paul Sperry: Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington. In: Google Books .
  6. ↑ "Offenders knew radical imams" In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 10, 2009.
  7. ↑ Scott Shane: Imam's Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad. In: The New York Times , May 8, 2010.
  8. ^ Hate preacher calls for jihad against the USA. In: Die Welt , March 18, 2010.
  9. ↑ Preacher calls on Muslims to kill their comrades. In: Spiegel Online , May 23, 2010.
  10. ↑ Mark D. Fefer: On the Advice of the FBI, cartoonist Molly Norris Disappears From View ( English ) In: Seattle Weekly . September 14, 2010. Archived from the original on September 17, 2010. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved October 13, 2011. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.seattleweekly.com
  11. ^ Yemen: Indictment against radical Islamic preachers in Yemen on focus.de from November 2, 2011
  12. ^ Radical Islamic preacher Anwar al Aulaqi in Yemen condemned on focus.de on January 17, 2011
  13. ↑ Islamic station in Sheffield loses license. (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; accessed on September 6, 2017 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.radioeins.de
  14. ↑ Loveday Morris: "The anatomy of a suicide bomber." In: The National , January 2, 2010 (English).
  15. ↑ Sudarsan Raghavan, Michael D. Shear: US-aided attack in Yemen thought to have killed Aulaqi, 2 al-Qaeda leaders. In: The Washington Post , December 25, 2009.
  16. ↑ Obama releases terror suspected US citizens to be killed. In: Spiegel Online , April 7, 2010.
  17. ↑ Mark Mazzetti: Drone Strike in Yemen Was Aimed at Awlaki. In: The New York Times , May 6, 2011, accessed May 7, 2011.
  18. ↑ Yassin Musharbash: US court should prevent targeted killing of al-Qaida cadres. In: Spiegel Online , August 27, 2010.
  19. ↑ Christina Hebel: Yemen reports death of hate preacher Awlaki. In: Spiegel Online , September 30, 2011.
  20. ↑ American Justice Department authorized killing of Aulaqi. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . October 1, 2011, accessed October 3, 2011 .
  21. ↑ a b c d SEAL, American Girl Die in First Trump-Era US Military Raid , NBC Nightly News , Jan. 31, 2017, accessed Feb. 1, 2017
  22. ↑ Orla Borg, Carsten Ellegaard Christensen and Morten Pihl: The Double Agent Who Infiltrated Al Qaeda. ( Memento from May 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: The Daily Beast , February 10, 2013 (English).
  23. ↑ America's dirty wars: "Obama feeds the beast" , n-tv.de, October 24, 2013
  24. ↑ 40 dead in US attack on al-Qaeda , Die Zeit, January 29, 2017
  25. ↑ Ayesha Rascoe: US military probing more possible civilian deaths in Yemen raid , Reuters, Feb. 2, 2017
  26. ↑ بوابتي: استشهاد الطفلة ”نوار العولقي” خلال عملية الإنزال العسكري الأمريكي بمحافظة البيضاء | بوابتي , January 27, 2017, accessed on Feb. 5, 2017
  27. ↑ Christoph Sydow: Attack on al-Qaeda in Yemen Trump's first military operation goes wrong , Der Spiegel, February 2, 2017
  28. ↑ Florian Rötzer : The deployment of the US special unit in Yemen was a fiasco , Telepolis February 2, 2017
  29. ^ Glenn Greenwald : Obama Killed a 16-Year-Old American in Yemen. Trump Just Killed His 8-Year-Old Sister. In: The Intercept , January 30, 2017, retrieved Feb. 5, 2017
  30. ↑ Trump and Obama: Two presidents, two dead children - the madness of the drone war. In: Der Stern , February 2, 2017, accessed on February 5, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Awlaki, Anwar al-
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Aulaqi, Anwar al-; 'Awlaqī, Anwar al-; أنور العولقي
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Muslim lecturer, spiritual leader, and former imam
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1971
PLACE OF BIRTH Las Cruces , USA
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 2011
Place of death Yemen