For more than five years now, as Western terrorism investigators have searched for critical influences behind the latest jihadi plot, one name has surfaced again and again. In the failed attack on an airliner over Detroit in 2009, the stabbing of a British member of Parliament in London in 2010, the lethal bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013 and now the machine-gunning of cartoonists and police officers in Paris, Anwar al-Awlaki has proved to be a sinister and durable inspiration.

Two of those four attacks took place after al-Awlaki, the silver-tongued, U.S.-born imam who joined al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen, was killed by a CIA drone strike in September 2011. In the age of YouTube, al-Awlaki’s death – or martyrdom, in the view of his followers – has hardly reduced his impact. The Internet magazine Inspire, which he oversaw along with another American, Samir Khan, has continued to spread not just militant rhetoric but also practical instructions on shooting and bomb-making.

In effect, al-Awlaki has become a leading brand name in the world of armed jihad. He operated mainly in English, the language of global commerce, and has helped attract a diverse group of volunteers. The four attacks were carried out by a Nigerian banker’s son, a British college student, two Chechen immigrants to Massachusetts and two Frenchmen of Algerian background. His pronouncements continue to provide a supposed religious rationale for thuggish acts vehemently denounced by the overwhelming majority of Muslims and Islamic authorities.

Al-Awlaki also became the face in the West of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, as it is widely known. Against the odds, the group, which was formally created in early 2009 by Yemeni and Saudi militants, has supplanted al-Qaida’s old core in Pakistan as the terrorist organization most feared by the United States and now, perhaps, by Europe as well.

Since it split with al-Qaida a year ago, the Islamic State has seized the international spotlight, first with territorial gains and more recently with beheadings of journalists and other hostages. But if AQAP was behind the machine-gunning in Paris of journalists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, then al-Qaida may have regained the publicity advantage in its rancorous rivalry with its offshoot.

The evidence that Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, and the late al-Awlaki, had a role in preparations for the Paris assault has accumulated steadily since Wednesday’s shootings. The two gunmen, identified by the French police as the brothers Saod and Chirif Kouachi, seemed determined to attach the AQAP-Awlaki label to their shooting spree.

An eyewitness heard the brothers yell to passers-by at the shooting scene to "tell the media that this is al-Qaida in Yemen." They reportedly told the driver of a car they hijacked that their attack was in revenge for al-Awlaki’s death.

Intelligence officials and eyewitnesses said the older brother, Saod Kouachi, 34, had spent time in Yemen between 2009 and 2012, getting firearms training from the al-Qaida branch and, according to some reports, meeting with al-Awlaki. According to a Yemeni journalist, Mohamed al-Kibsi, Saod Kouachi roomed briefly in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 with explosives hidden in his underwear. Abdulmutallab, who is now serving a life sentence in federal prison, told the FBI that his plot was approved and partly directed by al-Awlaki.

And Chirif Kouachi, 32, in a brief telephone interview with a French television reporter before he was killed with his brother on Friday, firmly associated the attack with AQAP and its former propagandist.

"I, Chirif Kouachi, was sent by al-Qaida in Yemen," the younger Kouachi said in audio later broadcast by the BFMTV channel in France. "I went there, and it was Sheik Anwar al-Awlaki who financed me." Frangois Molins, the Paris prosecutor, said at a news conference later that day that Chirif Kouachi had visited Yemen in 2011.

Also on Friday, a member of AQAP’s "media committee" sent journalists a statement explicitly claiming responsibility for the brothers’ attack. "The leadership of AQAP directed the operation, and they have chosen their target carefully as revenge for the honor of the prophet," the statement said. Another AQAP leader who regular speaks for the organization, Harith al-Nadari, issued an audio statement praising the attack, though he did not claim explicitly that the group was behind it.

None of the statements explained why the brothers had allowed nearly three years to pass after their return from Yemen before they attacked the newspaper.

"Awlaki’s name still pops up pretty often in cases of Western radicals, but given the amount of time since his death, it is unusual to see a case where the suspects actually met him," said J.M. Berger, a fellow with the Brookings Institution’s project on U.S. relations with the Islamic world who has studied al-Awlaki. "It reflects the long lead time on this plot. We may never know if this attack was formulated back then, or if the targets or particulars changed over time."

American Origins

Al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico in 1971 while his Yemeni father was a graduate student, went with his family to Yemen at the age of 7 and returned to the United States at 19 to study engineering at Colorado State University. He discovered a knack for preaching and spent eight years as a highly successful imam at mosques in Denver, San Diego and Washington, where he preached at the Capitol and was a luncheon speaker at the Pentagon.

He came under FBI scrutiny briefly in 1999 for contacts with known militants, and again in 2002 when agents discovered that three of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had worshiped in his mosques. The national Sept. 11 commission raised the possibility that al-Awlaki was part of a support network for the hijackers, but the FBI concluded that he had no prior knowledge of the plot.

In 2002, al-Awlaki moved to London, where he became a popular speaker and flirted more openly with militancy. After moving to Yemen in 2004, he began to espouse violent jihad against the United States and other countries he labeled enemies of Islam.

By 2009, when al-Awlaki was linked to Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people in a shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, the FBI, as well as the authorities in Canada and Britain, found that the cleric’s calls for violence were turning up on the laptops of nearly everyone they charged with plotting jihadi attacks. His website and Facebook page had attracted a large following across the English-speaking world, and scores of foreigners traveled to Yemen to meet him.

"Awlaki was a huge magnet," said Morten Storm, a Danish man who visited the cleric in Yemen, first as a convinced militant, and later, after growing disillusioned with Islam, as an agent of Danish, British and American intelligence agencies. Storm said the leader of AQAP, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, a former secretary to Osama bin Laden who now is the second-ranking figure in the global al-Qaida network, remained a revered figure among jihadis.

"If you want old-school al-Qaida, the place to go is still Yemen," Storm said in a telephone interview.

In the case of Hasan, who asked his views on the religious justification for killing U.S. soldiers, al-Awlaki declined to answer directly, sending two noncommittal replies. But by late 2009, the cleric had joined AQAP and was helping to prepare Abdulmutallab for his airliner attack.

‘Operational’ Terrorist

After the underwear bomb fizzled, President Barack Obama, judging that the cleric was now an "operational" terrorist, sought and received a Justice Department legal opinion declaring that killing him without a trial, despite his American citizenship, would violate neither the law nor the Constitution. During a 17-month manhunt, al-Awlaki helped AQAP send bombs in printer cartridges to the United States on cargo planes; a Saudi tip foiled the plan. But the cleric’s followers kept getting arrested, including Roshonara Choudhry, who said, after listening to more than 100 hours of al-Awlaki’s lectures, that she had stabbed a member of British Parliament who had voted in favor of the Iraq War.

The drone strike that killed al-Awlaki also killed Samir Khan and two other al-Qaida operatives, and two weeks later, another U.S. strike killed al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, infuriating many Yemenis. Obama administration officials have said the son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was not the intended target of the strike.

By then, in the fall of 2011, chaos in the wake of the ouster of Yemen’s longtime ruler, Ali Abdullah Saleh, had allowed al-Qaida to seize large swaths of territory in the country’s south. In 2012, Yemeni forces, and U.S. drone strikes, drove AQAP out of the towns it had captured.

But in recent months, as a Shiite militia known as the Houthis seized power in Sanaa and elsewhere across Yemen, AQAP has gained strength by rallying Sunni tribesmen against the Houthis. The growing violence, including numerous AQAP bombings, underscores the failure of Yemeni and U.S. efforts, including the drone campaign, to dismantle the group.

Dashed Hopes

American officials had hoped that the deaths of al-Awlaki and Khan, who were viewed as part of an AQAP cell focused on attacking the United States and Europe, would curb the group’s ambitions. But AQAP attempted a second underwear bombing of an airliner in 2012; it was foiled because the would-be bomber was an infiltrator sent by Saudi and Western intelligence agencies.

In April 2013, investigators found that the two Tsarnaev brothers, the Chechens accused in the Boston Marathon bombing, had been deeply influenced by al-Awlaki and had gotten their bomb-making directions from Inspire magazine.

The killings of AQAP’s main English-language propagandists did not slow down its robust media production. In fact, AQAP put out English-language videos and audio messages at a far faster rate in 2013 and 2014 than in earlier years, according to IntelCenter, a company that tracks jihadi media. Inspire magazine has continued to appear, and a 2013 issue called for the killing of Charlie Hebdo’s editor, Stiphane Charbonnier, among others. The Kouachi brothers sought out Charbonnier by name when they invaded the newspaper, and he was among the first to be killed.

Meanwhile, al-Awlaki’s voluminous work retains a huge following on YouTube and Islamic sites.

Most of the tens of thousands of Awlaki videos on YouTube feature his earlier, less controversial talks, which made him a best-seller on CD. But his later calls for attacks on America can also be found on the site without difficulty.

According to the company, YouTube prohibits material intended to incite violence, and it is removed when flagged by the site’s users and reviewed by the company’s paid staff. Some 14 million videos that violated YouTube’s rules were taken down in 2014. But company officials have wrestled with the free-speech implications of censoring material that may have news value or shed light on an important phenomenon like Islamist radicalism.

The graphic footage of the Kouachi brothers gunning down a French police officer, for instance, may technically violate YouTube’s standards but has been played on television around the world.

"YouTube has clear policies prohibiting violent content or content intended to incite violence," the company said, "and we remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users. We also terminate any account registered by a member of a designated foreign terrorist organization."

Berger, the Brookings fellow, said that while there had been a shift in online attention among jihadis from clerics to fighters, "most of Awlaki’s work is carefully constructed to be evergreen – it doesn’t become dated."

"It will continue to be important for years," he added.

Scott Shane, New York Times 

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