DUBAI, March 18, (RTRS): A US-born radical cleric linked to shootings at a US army base and the failed bombing of a US plane appeared to urge Muslims to conduct a jihad against the United States in an audiotape heard on Thursday.
US counterterrorism officials said in late February they were considering adding Anwar al-Awlaki to the US target list to kill or capture top militants if he appeared to pose a direct security threat. He is believed to be living in southern Yemen.
“To the Muslims in America, I have this to say: How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters?” the audiotape said.
CNN, which said on its website it had obtained the tape exclusively, said it could not authenticate the recording but cited sources saying they believe the voice on the tape is his. It also outlines Awlaki’s own path to radicalism.
“I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad (holy struggle) against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding upon every other able Muslim,” Awlaki said on the tape, clips of which were posted on CNN’s website.
Awlaki was reported as saying early in February he had taught the Nigerian suspect in the Dec 25 attempted bombing of a US-bound plane and supported his actions but had not ordered the attack.
US officials say Awlaki also had links to a US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at a Texas base in November.
Western allies and neighbouring Saudi Arabia fear al-Qaeda is exploiting instability in impoverished Yemen to recruit and train militants for attacks in the region and beyond.
Awlaki, a US citizen of Yemeni descent, returned to Yemen in 2004 where he taught at a university before he was arrested in 2006 for suspected links to al-Qaeda and involvement in attacks.
He was released in 2007 because he said he had repented, a Yemeni security official said. But he was later charged again and went into hiding.
In December, a Yemeni security official said Awlaki may have been one of 30 militants including top two leaders of al-Qaeda’s Yemen arm killed in an air raid in Shabwa province in southeast Yemen.
He later resurfaced. In January, a local government source in Shabwa said officials were in talks with tribal sheikhs to try to persuade him to surrender, or be taken by force.
In late February, US counterterrorism officials said US spy agencies believed Awlaki to have played a bigger role than first thought in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s decision to start launching attacks against US targets.
Born in New Mexico in the United States in 1971, Awlaki graduated in civil engineering from Colorado State University. His family is well-known in Yemen, where his father was a former agriculture minister.
Awlaki is also a former imam of mosques in Denver, San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia. Two of those mosques were attended by some of the Sept 11, 2001 hijackers.
“I lived in the US for 21 years,” the tape said. “America was my home. I was a preacher of Islam involved in non-violent Islamic activism. However with the American invasion of Iraq and continued US aggression against Muslims, I could not reconcile between living in the US and being a Muslim.”
Killed
Meanwhile, a US drone strike in Pakistan last week appears to have killed a top al-Qaeda planner who Washington believes helped organize December’s deadly suicide bombing at a CIA base in Afghanistan, US officials said on Wednesday.
The CIA has stepped up the intensity of unmanned aerial drone attacks and intelligence-gathering operations in Pakistan since the Dec. 30 bombing, which killed seven of the spy agency’s employees at a heavily fortified US base in the eastern Afghan province of Khost.
“We have indications that Hussein al-Yemeni — an important al-Qaeda planner and facilitator based in the tribal areas of Pakistan — was killed last week,” a US counterterrorism official said. “He’s thought to have played a key role in the attack on Dec 30 at Khost.”
The Khost bombing, the second-most deadly in CIA history, was carried out by a double agent linked to al-Qaeda who was recruited by Jordanian intelligence. US intelligence officials have vowed to avenge the attack.
CIA Director Leon Panetta, in an interview with the Washington Post published on its website on Wednesday, said attacks against al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal regions appear to have driven Osama bin Laden and other leaders deeper into hiding, leaving the organization incapable of planning sophisticated operations.
Al-Qaeda’s disarray was so profound that one of its lieutenants, in an intercepted message, pleaded to bin Laden to come to the group’s rescue and provide some leadership, Panetta told the newspaper.
“It’s pretty clear from all the intelligence we are getting that they are having a very difficult time putting together any kind of command and control, that they are scrambling. And that we really do have them on the run,” he said.
Other US intelligence officials have warned recently of a continuing threat from al-Qaeda, which carried out the Sept 11 attacks against the United States in 2001, and its affiliates.
The US counterterrorism official said Yemeni, in his late 20s or early 30s, had “established contacts” with groups ranging from Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to the network of Afghan Taleban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the CIA’s highest priority targets.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula took responsibility for an attempted Christmas Day bombing of a US airliner.
The counterterrorism official said the drone strike believed to have killed Yemeni took place in an area called Miram Shah.
US officials say the pilotless drones are one of the most effective weapons against militants. The strikes have killed senior Taleban and al-Qaeda figures but they have caused resentment in overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan, where anti-American feeling runs high.
Two missile strikes by drones on Wednesday killed at least nine militants in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region, a major al-Qaeda and Taleban sanctuary, according to intelligence officials and residents.