Anwar al-Awlaki’s family speaks out against his son’s death in airstrike

Source: Wash. Post

In the days before a CIA drone strike killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki last month, his 16-year-old son ran away from the family home in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa to try to find him, relatives say. When he, too, was killed in a U.S. airstrike Friday, the Awlaki family decided to speak out for the first time since the attacks.

“To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense,” said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and the boy’s grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. “They want to justify his killing, that’s all.”

The teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin were killed in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen.

The young Awlaki was the third American killed in Yemen in as many weeks. Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina, died alongside Anwar al-Awlaki.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/anwar-al-awlakis-family-speaks-out-against-his-sons-deaths/2011/10/17/gIQA8kFssL_singlePage.html

k&r nt

machines distinguish people from rodents by size
a house of vibrant, warm children is a most excellent infrared target

It's too bad that when he moved to Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki didn't leave his family here, in safety.

His grandfather forgets to mention that this child was in the company of Ibrahim al-Banna, the Egyptian media chief for al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate.

I wonder if he holds al-Qaeda accountable for having children around them. It's horrible that this teenager died.