Among the figures linked to al-Qaeda who had contact with the hijackers during the period in which they lived in the USA, there is one with a particularly distinctive profile, as he was not a citizen of an Arab state, but American. Imam Anwar al-Awlaki (whose name is written as Anwar Aulaqi in the 9/11 Commission Report) was in fact born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on April 21, 1971, into a family that had strong ties to the Yemeni government. His father Nasser al-Awlaki had been Minister of Agriculture for two years (as reported by the newspaper Santa Fe New Mexican) around 1990 (according to what was written by his son in al-Qaeda’s online magazine Inspire). Nasser al-Awlaki was also president of Sana'a University, again according to the Santa Fe New Mexican, starting in 2001. In addition, he was also related to Ali Mohammed Mujur, prime minister of Yemen from 2007 to 2011, although there is no more precise information on the degree of kinship: CNN, like other sources found online, simply uses the word relative.
Anwar al-Awlaki moved to Yemen with his family in 1978 and remained there for eleven years; upon his return he enrolled at Colorado State University, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. In the summer of 1993, before finishing his studies in Colorado, he spent several months in Afghanistan, where he joined the mujahideen in fighting the Soviet invasion; during the period spent in the Asian country he began to develop a deep interest in politics and religion. Upon his return to the USA, in addition to his engineering degree, he obtained a master’s degree in Education Leadership at the University of San Diego.
In 1994 he married a Yemeni cousin and began his activity as an imam in Denver, where he remained for another two years before moving again to San Diego. From 1996 to 2000 he was imam of the al-Ribat mosque, where two of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, listened to many of his sermons. During this period al-Awlaki came onto the FBI’s radar for possible contacts with Hamas, with al-Qaeda member Ziyad Khaleel and with the jihadist Omar Abdel-Rahman (also known as The Blind Sheikh), however investigators were unable to gather sufficient evidence to bring charges against him.
In 2000 he moved to Washington to pursue a doctorate in Human Resources Development at George Washington University, and in the capital he carried out his work as an imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque, where the hijacker pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, Hani Hanjour (along with Nawaf al-Hazmi), also listened to his sermons. At the time he was considered a peaceful and moderate man, with no connections to terrorism, whose strength lay in his ability to attract worshippers who did not speak Arabic, given that he obviously spoke native-level English. In those years he also became the Muslim chaplain of George Washington University.
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| The Dar Al-Hijrah mosque |
Immediately after 9/11, al-Awlaki maintained his public role as a moderate imam and, in various interviews including those given to the New York Times and National Geographic, condemned the attacks. He also led a prayer at the US Capitol for the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association (a bicameral organization that brings together Muslim members of Congress). At the same time, however, he displayed ambiguous behavior, because six days after the attacks he wrote a post on the website IslamOnLine.net in which he claimed that the perpetrators of the attacks could have been Israeli intelligence services and that the FBI was focusing only on passengers with Arabic names. The man returned to the attention of the FBI when investigators discovered that three of the hijackers had attended the mosques where he preached and that Ramzi bin al-Shibh (coordinator of the Hamburg cell) had his phone number among his personal contacts. The FBI placed him under surveillance and interrogated him four times in the eight days following 9/11; however, not enough elements emerged to link him to the attacks.
In June 2002 a federal judge issued an arrest warrant for Anwar al-Awlaki on the grounds that he had made false statements when applying for a passport, claiming to be Yemeni and not American, in order to obtain a scholarship that was intended exclusively for foreign citizens. However, a few months later, prosecutors dropped the warrant, arguing that there was insufficient evidence to justify an arrest; one of them added in a statement to the press that by doing so al-Awlaki would have had fewer chances of obtaining a social security number than if he had declared himself American. On the very same day the warrant was withdrawn (or according to other reconstructions, the following day), al-Awlaki was briefly detained at JFK airport upon returning to the USA from Saudi Arabia, both because of the arrest warrant and because he was on the FBI’s terrorism watch list; however, he was released after less than an hour and a half because the warrant had been withdrawn, and the man was thus able to continue his journey to Washington.
In the final months of 2002, al-Awlaki left the USA to move to the United Kingdom due to the hostile climate that had developed around him following 9/11. He remained in the United Kingdom until 2004, the year in which the 9/11 Commission Report was published. According to what is reported in the commission’s report, Anwar al-Awlaki played an active role in the execution of the 9/11 attacks, because although he was not Saudi he collaborated with the Saudis who assisted the hijackers. The 9/11 Commission Report specifies that the man tasked Eyad al-Rababah, an al-Qaeda member originally from Jordan who had moved to the USA, with helping Hani Hanjour find housing once he settled in Virginia. According to what was reported by FBI Special Agent Wade Ammerman, al-Awlaki himself hosted them for a certain period. In addition, the imam also collaborated directly with Omar al-Bayoumi, with whom he spoke by phone four times on February 4, 2000, the day al-Bayoumi helped the two terrorists find an apartment, and he met the two hijackers for the first time on the very day they arrived in San Diego.
He returned to Yemen in 2004, where he taught at al-Iman University, an institution that promoted Islamic radicalism and was founded and at the time directed by al-Qaeda associate Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. In 2006 he was arrested for having participated in the kidnapping of a young Shiite in order to demand ransom from the family and for having planned the kidnapping of a collaborator of American military personnel. During his imprisonment he was interrogated by the FBI about the 9/11 attacks. He was released in 2007 following pressure from his tribe or, according to another version, because he demonstrated that he had repented. After being released from prison, al-Awlaki took refuge in the mountainous area of Yemen between the governorates of Shabwa and Mareb.
The FBI continued its investigations into him and concluded that he collaborated with al-Qaeda as a recruiter and spiritual guide and that he had ties to various terrorists, such as Nidal Hasan (the perpetrator of the 2009 Fort Hood military base shooting), Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (known as the Christmas Underwear Bomber, the man who attempted to blow himself up on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009), and Faisal Shahzad (known as the Times Square Bomber, who planned a car bomb attack in Times Square in 2010). His messages and sermons were also found by investigators on the computers of many terrorism suspects in the USA and Canada. In addition, the imam himself called for jihad against the USA, arguing that it should unite Muslims around the world.
Because of his ties to al-Qaeda, the Yemeni government initially attempted to kill him with an airstrike and later to obtain his surrender from local tribal leaders, with the promise not to hand him over to the USA, but both attempts failed.
In 2010 the White House placed al-Awlaki on the list of individuals whom the CIA was authorized to kill because of his terrorist activities; the decision was nevertheless controversial because ordering the killing of an American citizen requires authorization from an internal group within the National Security Council, whose activities lack transparency. The following year, U.S. forces located him, also thanks to the work of the spy Morten Storm whom we interviewed in 2024, and attempted twice to kill him with drones, the first time unsuccessfully in May and the second time, on September 30, when they killed him.
The debate over the legality of the targeted killing mission continued for years, and in 2014 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Obama Administration had to make public the documents authorizing the operation. The Department of Justice therefore published a memorandum dating back to 2010; the document was harshly criticized by the New York Times, which argued that the threat posed by al-Awlaki was vague and called for the release of additional evidence regarding the decision-making process.
That of al-Awlaki is, in short, a very complex case that illustrates how difficult it is to untangle the web of events surrounding 9/11. It shows, for example, how the network of Saudi citizens who assisted the hijackers had significant contacts also among American extremist Muslims and, at the same time, how difficult it is to make decisions on how to combat terrorism, balancing citizens’ rights and national security.
