Nasser al-Awlaki

Nasser al-Awlaki is a Yemeni scholar and politician. He is the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who were killed in separate U.S. drone strikes. Nasser is also the grandfather of Nawar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a U.S. raid in Yemen in 2017.

After the deaths of his son and grandson, Nasser published a six-minute audio message condemning the U.S. for the killings. In the audio, he said of then-President Barack Obama:

I urge the American people to bring the killers to justice. I urge them to expose the hypocrisy of the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate. To some, he may be that. To me and my family, he is nothing more than a child killer.

— q.v. TIME, CNN

Al-Awlaki claimed his son Anwar was far from any battlefield. In 2010, al-Awlaki also said he believed Anwar been wrongly accused and had not been a member of al-Qaeda.

On 29 January 2017, Nawar al-Awlaki, Nasser's 8-year-old granddaughter, was the third member of his family to be killed by the U.S. The girl was among several civilians killed in the Yakla raid, the first covert operation ordered by President Donald Trump. Nasser said that “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” “Why kill children? This is the new (U.S.) administration - it’s very sad, a big crime.”

Nasser al-Awlaki's son Anwar was a U.S. citizen, born in New Mexico in 1971 while Nasser was earning his Master's degree in agricultural economics at New Mexico State University.

A Fulbright Scholar, Nasser received a doctorate at the University of Nebraska. He subsequently worked at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1977.

Nasser was a prominent member of then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh's ruling party. He served as Agriculture Minister and President of Sana'a University.