Anwar al-Awlaki

Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki (Arabic: أنور العولقي, romanized: Anwar al-'Awlaqī; April 21 or 22, 1971 – September 30, 2011) was an American-Yemeni lecturer assassinated in Yemen in 2011 by a U.S. government drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki was the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and assassinated by a U.S. government drone strike. U.S. government officials alleged that al-Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda.

Al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 to parents from Yemen. Growing up partly in the United States and partly in Yemen, he attended various U.S. universities in the 1990s and early 2000s. He also worked as an imam despite having no religious qualifications and almost no religious education. Al-Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004 and became a university lecturer after a brief stint as a public speaker in the United Kingdom. He was detained by Yemeni authorities in 2006 and spent 18 months in prison before being released without facing trial.

Following his release from Yemeni custody, Al-Awlaki had significantly radicalized, and began to speak overtly in support of violence, also condemning the U.S. government's foreign policy towards Muslims. He was linked to Nidal Hasan, the convicted perpetrator of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to detonate a bomb on Northwest Airlines Flight 253. The Yemeni government tried al-Awlaki in absentia in November 2010 for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive". U.S. officials said that in 2009, al-Awlaki was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda. He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States. In April 2010, al-Awlaki was placed on a CIA kill list by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki's father and civil rights groups challenged the order in court. The U.S. deployed unmanned aircraft (drones) in Yemen to search for and kill him, firing at and failing to kill him at least once. Al-Awlaki was killed on September 30, 2011.

In June 2014, a previously classified memorandum from the U.S. Department of Justice was released; the memorandum described al-Awlaki's killing as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have called the killing of al-Awlaki an extrajudicial execution that breached al-Awlaki's constitutional rights. The New York Times wrote in 2015 that al-Awlaki's public statements and videos had been more influential in inspiring acts of Islamic terrorism in the wake of his killing than they were before his death.