Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [65]
The FBI had rounded up some of the most dangerous and experienced al Qaeda members in the United States, albeit belatedly. Unfortunately, there would be more where they came from. Some had already started their journey to al Qaeda.
7
The Rise of Anwar Awlaki
Las Cruces, New Mexico, is an old pioneer town turned small city, where the sun shines 350 days out of the year. It began life as an armed encampment to protect settlers from Apache raids. Legend holds that the town was named after the cross-shaped grave markers littering the valley in the wake of those attacks.1
In more recent times, the city was home to Dr. Nasser Al Awlaki, an agronomist studying at New Mexico State University. In 1971 his wife gave birth to a son, Anwar Nasser Awlaki.2
The Awlakis lived in the United States until young Anwar was seven, when they returned to their homeland, Yemen. The family was influential, and the elder Awlaki became the country’s agriculture minister during Anwar’s formative years.3
His son was raised on a diet of tales from the front lines in Afghanistan. “There was constant talk of the heroes who were leaving Yemen to join the fight and become martyrs and go to paradise,” one of his Yemeni neighbors remembered. Around the neighborhood, mujahideen videotapes were treated like a cross between family entertainment and the evening news.4
Awlaki was an intelligent boy, speaking flawless, unaccented English with an equally impressive command of Arabic. He consumed American popular culture voraciously and returned to the United States in 1991 to study engineering at Colorado State University—on a U.S. government scholarship awarded to foreign students. He lied about his citizenship in order to qualify.5
In 1993 Awlaki took a trip to Afghanistan, but documentation is sparse. At the time the country was being ripped apart by an internecine war among factions that had managed to unite only long enough to drive the Soviets out. A college friend said in 2010 that Awlaki had spent one summer training with the mujahideen in Afghanistan, but there is no other information about the trip.6
When Awlaki returned to Colorado, he was no longer interested in engineering. Instead he started to volunteer as a lecturer at the Denver Islamic Society. During the 1990s Awlaki immersed himself in Islamic studies through correspondence courses and by studying with various mentors. One of the more notable figures who tutored Awlaki in the ways of Islam was Hassan Al Ahdal, a Yemeni sheikh who spent several years writing and editing for the Muslim World League’s English-language magazine. Al Ahdal’s writings tended toward militancy and anti-Semitism.7
Awlaki’s facility with the English language, combined with his encyclopedic religious knowledge and credible Arabic, made for a powerful cocktail of skills. He was remembered as a gifted speaker who was capable of moving men to action. He soon moved from volunteer status to a paid position.
“He could talk to people directly—looking them in the eye. He had this magic,” one member of the mosque remembered.8
Even at this early stage in his career, he was a study in contradictions. To some who heard him speak, he was the voice of moderation, representing the most uplifting elements of Islam. Yet others perceived a dark side.
Awlaki consistently preached that Muslims around the world were under constant attack and that these attacks justified an armed response, themes that would continue throughout his career. He was so persuasive that he convinced one Saudi student attending college in the area to abandon his studies and join the jihad in Bosnia. The student was later killed while fighting in Chechnya.9
Awlaki soon moved on to bigger things, landing in the San Diego area, where he became the imam of the Ar-Ribat Al-Islami mosque in La Mesa. Ribat was a modest building in a residential neighborhood,