Nawar al-Awlaki would have been 16 this year. She was dead long before that. Nawar was just 8 years old when on January 29, 2017 she was killed during a pre-dawn raid on the Yemeni village of al-Ghayil. The raid was carried out by the US Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and commandos from the United Arab Emirates.
Donald Trump personally ordered the raid, just nine days into his first term as president, although planning had begun under the Obama Administration. The raid was a fiasco. Conceived as a swift there-and-gone operation, the raid turned into a 50-minute firefight. Killed were ten to thirty civilians, including Nawar, fourteen Al-Qaeda fighters, and one US serviceman. A $75 million MV-22 Osprey aircraft was seriously damaged and had to be destroyed.
Initially, the Pentagon said that the mission’s purpose was to extract intelligence on al-Qaeda operatives. Only later, did the US admit that the mission’s true purpose—which failed—was to capture or kill Qasim al-Raymi, the head of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. (Al-Raymi would be killed in a US airstrike in January 2020.)
Nawar might have been just one more nameless casualty of US wars, if not for two facts. Nawar was an American citizen and she was the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric killed in Yemen by a Hellfire missile fired from a US drone on September 30, 2011.
Nawar’s father was an American citizen who had been born in New Mexico. Anwar had been targeted for death during one of the White House “Terror Tuesdays” at which President Barack Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, personally selected persons for drone assassination. Al-Awlaki made it onto the White House “Kill List” for his work as a propagandist for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Al-Awlaki’s father, a former Fulbright scholar as well as a former cabinet minister and university president in Yemen, brought two federal lawsuits against the Obama Administration. The first lawsuit was filed in response to rumors that the younger al-Awlaki had been placed on a government “kill list.” That suit sought to enjoin the planned assassination. After Anwar was killed, his father brought a second suit for wrongful death. Both lawsuits hinged on the legal question whether a US citizen can be killed without due process of law. Anwar al-Awlaki had never been charged, much less convicted, of a crime. Both suits were dismissed.
Two weeks after Anwar al-Awlaki’s death, his teenage son Abdulrahman (also a US citizen) was also killed by a US drone strike in Yemen. It has not been alleged that Abdulrahman was deliberately targeted. That does not change the fact that a father and his two young children—all three US citizens—were killed by the US.
“The Most Militaristic Person There Is”
Why bring up Nawar’s death now? The reason is that eight years after giving the disastrous order that ended the life of Nawar al-Awlaki, Trump again holds the power of life and death over children and adults. We should look at how Trump has exercised that power in the past.
Horrific as was the raid on al-Ghayil, Trump was just getting started. An even worse massacre of civilians would take place on March 17, 2017 when a US airstrike on west Mosul in Iraq killed 200+ civilians.
Trump continued President Barack Obama’s support for Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war on Yemen and vetoed a War Powers Resolution passed by Congress which would have ended the US role in the slaughter. Instead, Trump boasted about selling arms to Saudi Arabia.
Trump unnecessarily exacerbated tensions with North Korea which could have escalated into nuclear war. (This was before Trump became best buds with Kim Jong Un).
Trump sanctioned the International Criminal Court during his first term and plans to do so again now that he is back in office.
Trump supports Israel without reservation. On January 25, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, cut off all US foreign aid—except to Israel and Egypt.
Trump added to tensions with Iran by assassinating Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.
In 2015, candidate Trump said that in order to “take out” ISIS it was necessary to “take out their families.”Trump wouldn’t have a problem with killing Nawar or her brother or any number of children. Trump has called himself “the most militaristic person there is.” Yet, the belief persists in the MAGA movement that Trump is a peacemaker who will end “forever wars.” This is in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Trump has been back in the White House less than two weeks and already he is talking publicly about launching a “soft invasion” of Mexico against drug cartels with or without the Mexican government’s consent. He has wondered aloud about retaking the Panama Canal by force, annexing Greenland, and making Canada the “51st state.” How much of this crazy talk is bluff undertaken to extort concessions from other countries is something that God alone knows.
The things Trump has done are horrifying. And they are not the worse things US presidents have done. Truman dropped two atomic bombs on the civilian population centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Johnson and Nixon killed millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians. George W. Bush started a war of aggression in Iraq. None of this should surprise us. This is how empires act. Expect more killing. Trump is just warming up.