Anwar al-Awlaki's Death: Is America Any Safer?

 Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Islamist preacher who was killed in an air strike in Yemen yesterday aged 40, was the world’s most wanted man even before the death of Osama bin Laden in May this year. Unlike bin Laden who, before his death, had not been seen for many years, Awlaki was loud and public, and was considered highly successful in converting many young western Muslims to global jihad. Last year the CIA put him on its hit-list of assassination targets, while Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, named him as the West’s Public Enemy No 1, observing that Awlaki’s involvement with al-Qaeda “is of particular concern given his wide circle of adherents in the West, including in the UK”.The first time that many people heard Awlaki’s name was at the beginning of last year, when he was alleged to have recruited and advised Umar Abdulmutallab, the young African who attempted to blow up a plane carrying hundreds of passengers over Detroit on Christmas Day by detonating a device in his underpants. However, Awlaki had been known to Western intelligence for several years before that. Some of the September 11 hijackers had respected Awlaki as a religious figure. Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon building, attended a mosque where he preached.For Awlaki was not a gun-toting terrorist warlord, but a preacher, broadcasting his ideology in sermons in mosques and, more pervasively, the internet. CDs or downloads of his Constants on the Path of Jihad, a series of lectures purporting to be commentaries on Islamic texts (which were, until recently, freely available on YouTube), have been found in possession of almost every radical who has executed, or attempted to execute, attacks on Western targets over the past decade.
They include the July 7 bombers in London, who used to meet in a bookshop that sold lectures by Awlaki; Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009 (Hasan was also discovered to have asked for Awlaki’s advice in emails about a suicide attack); and the Canadian-based terrorists known as the Toronto 18, who were plotting to bomb the city’s stock exchange.Court records from 2009 show that three out of the five men convicted for plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, two years previously had also been inspired by Awlaki’s lectures. Awlaki’s particular contribution to terrorist strategy was to encourage his followers to mount small-scale attacks causing widespread fear without always trying to stage a September 11-style “spectacular”.To some extent, Awlaki was a by-product of the West’s success in restraining al-Qaeda’s activities in Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan. Bin Laden’s network, though not beaten, became scattered, and as a result the proportion of terrorist plots against Western targets thought to have origins in that region are said to have fallen by around 50 per cent or more. Many of al-Qaeda’s foreign fighters relocated to Somalia or to Yemen – and it was in Yemen that Awlaki based his internet terrorist empire.The web gave him access to the bedrooms of disenchanted young Muslims around the world, creating a major headache for Western intelligence services. They saw him as especially pernicious because Awlaki was himself an American citizen, and was able to reach out in perfect English to potential home-grown jihadists in the West, influencing second and third generation Muslim immigrants who may not speak Arabic. He also had an intuitive understanding of the experience of Muslim minorities in Western societies.Indeed Awlaki’s father, a former Fulbright scholar and Yemeni minister, described him as “an educated man who used to love everything about America; he used to go offshore fishing, he used to go hiking, he was in every bit an all-American boy.”Anwar al-Awlaki was born in 1971 in Las Cruces, New Mexico — his father, Nasser, was studying Agricultural Economics at the state university. In 1978, when Awlaki was seven, the family moved back to Yemen, where his father served as agriculture minister and later became a university president.In 1991, aged 20, Awlaki returned to America to study Civil Engineering at Colorado State University. He later lived in San Diego, where he obtained an MA in Education, and then studied for a doctorate in WashingtonDuring this period Awlaki began to take a greater interest in religion and politics, possibly influenced by meeting Islamist radicals during a trip to Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation. He began to acquire a reputation as a firebrand preacher at mosques around San Diego and later in Virginia, though his devout image was sullied by several arrests for soliciting prostitutes.