In Memory of Nawar al-Awlaki, Age 8 |
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........