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SEAL, American Girl Die in First Trump-Era U.S. Military Raid
In what an official said was the first military raid carried out under President Donald Trump, two Americans were killed in Yemen on Sunday - one a member of SEAL Team 6 and the other the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born al Qaeda leader who himself was killed in a U.S. strike five years ago.
The raid in southern Yemen, conducted by the supersecret Joint Special Operations Command, was intended to capture valuable intelligence, specifically computer equipment, according to a senior U.S. military official. Three al Qaeda leaders were killed, according to U.S. officials.
Contrary to earlier reporting, the senior military official said, the raid was Trump's first clandestine strike - not a holdover mission approved by President Barack Obama. The mission involved "boots on the ground" at an al Qaeda camp near al Bayda in south central Yemen, the official said.
"Almost everything went wrong," the official said.
An MV-22 Osprey experienced a hard landing near the site, injuring several SEALs, one severely. The tilt-rotor aircraft had to be destroyed. A SEAL was killed during the firefight on the ground, as were some noncombatants, including females.
Defense Secretary James Mattis had to leave one of Washington's biggest annual social events, the Alfalfa Club Dinner, to deal with the repercussions, according to the official. He did not return.
On Monday, he released a statement identifying the dead SEAL as Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens and said, "Ryan gave his full measure for our nation, and in performing his duty, he upheld the noblest standard of military service."
The senior military official said the 8-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki, also known as Nora, was among the noncombatants killed in the raid, which also resulted in the death of several Yemeni women. U.S. officials said some of the women who were killed, however, were combatants and had opened fire on the SEALs as they approached the al Qaeda camp.
The girl's grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, Yemen's former agriculture minister, told NBC News a different story. He identified his granddaughter as the dead girl from a photo taken at the scene of the raid but based his description on what happened at the camp on conversations with what he characterized as Yemeni sources.
"My granddaughter was staying for a while with her mother, so when the attack came, they were sitting in the house, and a bullet struck her in her neck at 2:30 past midnight. Other children in the same house were killed," al-Awlaki said. He said the girl died two hours after being shot.
"They [the SEALs] entered another house and killed everybody in it, including all the women. They burned the house. There is an assumption there was a woman [in the house] from Saudi Arabia who was with al Qaeda. All we know is that she was a children's teacher."
Al-Awlaki said the girl and her mother had fled the Yemeni capital, Sa'ana, where he lives, to escape the heavy shelling.
The child's mother, Anwar al-Awlaki's widow, survived the raid with a minor wound, according to Nasser al-Awlaki. However, Anwar al-Awlaki's brother-in-law was killed in the raid. The death toll varies according to the sourcing, with the Pentagon saying 14 militants died, along with "numerous" civilians. Nasser al-Awlaki said Yemenis were circulating a body count of combatants and civilians as high as 59.
In explaining the attack, the senior U.S. military official told NBC News: "Al Qaeda is probably stronger in Yemen than in any other country. The U.S. has mounted in intense effort for the past three years from ship, air and drone to go after a reconstituting core al Qaeda organization in Yemen."
The raid, said the official, was directed from a U.S. base in Djibouti, across the Gulf of Aden from the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula and the western edge of Yemen. Officially, the United States was searching for "information that will likely provide insight into the planning of future terror plots."
Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham University's Center on National Security, said the girl's death will be a boon to al Qaeda propagandists.
"The perception will be that it's not enough to kill al-Awlaki - that the U.S. had to kill the entire family," she said.
Nawar's father, Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone on Sept. 30, 2011, not far from Sunday's raid. The U.S. Justice Department had approved killing him in a memorandum that was disclosed in 2014. The memo concluded, "We do not believe that al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship imposes constitutional limitations that would preclude the contemplated lethal action" by the U.S. military or the CIA.
Al-Awlaki, who was born while his father was a graduate student in the United States, moved to Yemen and became a prodigious propagandist who, the United States said in the memo, had played "operational and leadership roles" with al Qaeda and "continues to plot attacks intended to kill Americans."
U.S. intelligence also believed al-Awlaki was a potential successor to Osama Bin Laden, who had been killed six months earlier.
Nawar al-Awlaki is the second of Anwar al-Awlaki's children to be killed by U.S. forces. Two weeks after Anwar was killed in late 2011, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was also struck in a drone strike. U.S. officials said the younger al-Awlaki was in the wrong place at the wrong time - that he was with their intended target, an al Qaeda leader.
Intentional or not, Greenberg said, the deaths of three al-Awlaki family members will enhance the al Qaeda narrative. She noted that as part of propaganda efforts, terrorist groups have begun to circulate photographs of children reputedly killed by U.S. forces. Photos of Nawar al-Awlaki alive and dead are already circulating widely in Arab media.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a statement via online jihadi media referring to the raid as a "massacre," said U.S. troops had fired on women and children "in cold blood," and accused the SEALs of having "no human values."
SEAL, American Girl Die in First Trump-Era U.S. Military Raid
Eight-year-old American girl 'killed in Yemen raid approved by Trump'
Poll: 49% of Americans agree with Trump's immigration ban
Americans are sharply divided over President Donald Trump's order to temporarily block U.S. entry for all refugees and citizens of seven Muslim countries, with slightly more approving the measure than disapproving, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday.
The Jan. 30-31 poll found that 49 percent of American adults said they either "strongly" or "somewhat" agreed with Trump's order, while 41 percent "strongly" or "somewhat" disagreed and another 10 percent said they don't know.
But the responses were split almost entirely along party lines. Some 53 percent of Democrats said they "strongly disagree" with Trump's action while 51 percent of Republicans said they "strongly agree."
Trump's executive order banned refugees from entering the United States for 120 days, and it placed an indefinite hold on Syrian refugees. It also blocked citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
The president, who campaigned on a promise to bring what he called "extreme vetting" to the nation's immigration system, said the order he signed on Friday was meant to protect the country and its borders. "This is not a Muslim ban," he said.
But confusion over who was covered by Trump's order left travelers, airlines and foreign governments scrambling to get clarity from U.S. officials, many of whom were also bewildered.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found 31 percent of Americans feel "more safe" because of the ban, compared with 26 percent who said they felt "less safe." Some 38 percent said they felt the United States was setting "a good example" of how best to confront terrorism, while 41 percent said the country was setting "a bad example."
Democrats were more than three times as likely as Republicans to say that the "U.S. should continue to take in immigrants and refugees," and Republicans were more than three times as likely as Democrats to agree that "banning people from Muslim countries is necessary to prevent terrorism."
Most Americans, however, don't think the country should show a preference for Christian refugees, as Trump has suggested. Some 56 percent, including 72 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Republicans, disagreed that the country should "welcome Christian refugees, but not Muslim ones."
At the weekend, protesters swarmed major U.S. airports where some immigrants had been temporarily detained because of the order. Lawmakers, including some from Trump's Republican Party, denounced the decision as discriminatory and counterproductive for national security.
More than a dozen state attorneys general said they would work together to fight the order, and the top federal government lawyer, Sally Yates, was fired after she refused to defend it.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English in all 50 states. It gathered poll responses from 1,201 people including 453 Democrats and 478 Republicans. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points for the entire sample and 5 percentage points for the Democrats and the Republicans.
Poll: 49% of Americans agree with Trump's immigration ban
SEAL, American Girl Die in First Trump-Era U.S. Military Raid
In what an official said was the first military raid carried out under President Donald Trump, two Americans were killed in Yemen on Sunday - one a member of SEAL Team 6 and the other the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born al Qaeda leader who himself was killed in a U.S. strike five years ago.
The raid in southern Yemen, conducted by the supersecret Joint Special Operations Command, was intended to capture valuable intelligence, specifically computer equipment, according to a senior U.S. military official. Three al Qaeda leaders were killed, according to U.S. officials.
Contrary to earlier reporting, the senior military official said, the raid was Trump's first clandestine strike - not a holdover mission approved by President Barack Obama. The mission involved "boots on the ground" at an al Qaeda camp near al Bayda in south central Yemen, the official said.
"Almost everything went wrong," the official said.
An MV-22 Osprey experienced a hard landing near the site, injuring several SEALs, one severely. The tilt-rotor aircraft had to be destroyed. A SEAL was killed during the firefight on the ground, as were some noncombatants, including females.
Defense Secretary James Mattis had to leave one of Washington's biggest annual social events, the Alfalfa Club Dinner, to deal with the repercussions, according to the official. He did not return.
On Monday, he released a statement identifying the dead SEAL as Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens and said, "Ryan gave his full measure for our nation, and in performing his duty, he upheld the noblest standard of military service."
The senior military official said the 8-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki, also known as Nora, was among the noncombatants killed in the raid, which also resulted in the death of several Yemeni women. U.S. officials said some of the women who were killed, however, were combatants and had opened fire on the SEALs as they approached the al Qaeda camp.
The girl's grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, Yemen's former agriculture minister, told NBC News a different story. He identified his granddaughter as the dead girl from a photo taken at the scene of the raid but based his description on what happened at the camp on conversations with what he characterized as Yemeni sources.
"My granddaughter was staying for a while with her mother, so when the attack came, they were sitting in the house, and a bullet struck her in her neck at 2:30 past midnight. Other children in the same house were killed," al-Awlaki said. He said the girl died two hours after being shot.
"They [the SEALs] entered another house and killed everybody in it, including all the women. They burned the house. There is an assumption there was a woman [in the house] from Saudi Arabia who was with al Qaeda. All we know is that she was a children's teacher."
Al-Awlaki said the girl and her mother had fled the Yemeni capital, Sa'ana, where he lives, to escape the heavy shelling.
The child's mother, Anwar al-Awlaki's widow, survived the raid with a minor wound, according to Nasser al-Awlaki. However, Anwar al-Awlaki's brother-in-law was killed in the raid. The death toll varies according to the sourcing, with the Pentagon saying 14 militants died, along with "numerous" civilians. Nasser al-Awlaki said Yemenis were circulating a body count of combatants and civilians as high as 59.
In explaining the attack, the senior U.S. military official told NBC News: "Al Qaeda is probably stronger in Yemen than in any other country. The U.S. has mounted in intense effort for the past three years from ship, air and drone to go after a reconstituting core al Qaeda organization in Yemen."
The raid, said the official, was directed from a U.S. base in Djibouti, across the Gulf of Aden from the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula and the western edge of Yemen. Officially, the United States was searching for "information that will likely provide insight into the planning of future terror plots."
Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham University's Center on National Security, said the girl's death will be a boon to al Qaeda propagandists.
"The perception will be that it's not enough to kill al-Awlaki - that the U.S. had to kill the entire family," she said.
Nawar's father, Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone on Sept. 30, 2011, not far from Sunday's raid. The U.S. Justice Department had approved killing him in a memorandum that was disclosed in 2014. The memo concluded, "We do not believe that al-Awlaki's U.S. citizenship imposes constitutional limitations that would preclude the contemplated lethal action" by the U.S. military or the CIA.
Al-Awlaki, who was born while his father was a graduate student in the United States, moved to Yemen and became a prodigious propagandist who, the United States said in the memo, had played "operational and leadership roles" with al Qaeda and "continues to plot attacks intended to kill Americans."
U.S. intelligence also believed al-Awlaki was a potential successor to Osama Bin Laden, who had been killed six months earlier.
Nawar al-Awlaki is the second of Anwar al-Awlaki's children to be killed by U.S. forces. Two weeks after Anwar was killed in late 2011, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was also struck in a drone strike. U.S. officials said the younger al-Awlaki was in the wrong place at the wrong time - that he was with their intended target, an al Qaeda leader.
Intentional or not, Greenberg said, the deaths of three al-Awlaki family members will enhance the al Qaeda narrative. She noted that as part of propaganda efforts, terrorist groups have begun to circulate photographs of children reputedly killed by U.S. forces. Photos of Nawar al-Awlaki alive and dead are already circulating widely in Arab media.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a statement via online jihadi media referring to the raid as a "massacre," said U.S. troops had fired on women and children "in cold blood," and accused the SEALs of having "no human values."
SEAL, American Girl Die in First Trump-Era U.S. Military Raid
Eight-year-old American girl 'killed in Yemen raid approved by Trump'
Click to viewPoll: 49% of Americans agree with Trump's immigration ban
Americans are sharply divided over President Donald Trump's order to temporarily block U.S. entry for all refugees and citizens of seven Muslim countries, with slightly more approving the measure than disapproving, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday.
The Jan. 30-31 poll found that 49 percent of American adults said they either "strongly" or "somewhat" agreed with Trump's order, while 41 percent "strongly" or "somewhat" disagreed and another 10 percent said they don't know.
But the responses were split almost entirely along party lines. Some 53 percent of Democrats said they "strongly disagree" with Trump's action while 51 percent of Republicans said they "strongly agree."
Trump's executive order banned refugees from entering the United States for 120 days, and it placed an indefinite hold on Syrian refugees. It also blocked citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
The president, who campaigned on a promise to bring what he called "extreme vetting" to the nation's immigration system, said the order he signed on Friday was meant to protect the country and its borders. "This is not a Muslim ban," he said.
But confusion over who was covered by Trump's order left travelers, airlines and foreign governments scrambling to get clarity from U.S. officials, many of whom were also bewildered.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found 31 percent of Americans feel "more safe" because of the ban, compared with 26 percent who said they felt "less safe." Some 38 percent said they felt the United States was setting "a good example" of how best to confront terrorism, while 41 percent said the country was setting "a bad example."
Democrats were more than three times as likely as Republicans to say that the "U.S. should continue to take in immigrants and refugees," and Republicans were more than three times as likely as Democrats to agree that "banning people from Muslim countries is necessary to prevent terrorism."
Most Americans, however, don't think the country should show a preference for Christian refugees, as Trump has suggested. Some 56 percent, including 72 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Republicans, disagreed that the country should "welcome Christian refugees, but not Muslim ones."
At the weekend, protesters swarmed major U.S. airports where some immigrants had been temporarily detained because of the order. Lawmakers, including some from Trump's Republican Party, denounced the decision as discriminatory and counterproductive for national security.
More than a dozen state attorneys general said they would work together to fight the order, and the top federal government lawyer, Sally Yates, was fired after she refused to defend it.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English in all 50 states. It gathered poll responses from 1,201 people including 453 Democrats and 478 Republicans. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points for the entire sample and 5 percentage points for the Democrats and the Republicans.
Poll: 49% of Americans agree with Trump's immigration ban