Yemen says airstrikes hit al-Qaida operatives

WASHINGTON – The Yemeni government said it carried out airstrikes Thursday on a suspected gathering of al-Qaida operatives, and indicated that a radical cleric tied to the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, may have been among those killed.

“Yemeni fighter jets launched an aerial assault” before dawn on a compound in the southern part of the country, according to a statement issued Thursday by the Yemeni Embassy in Washington.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric who communicated with the Fort Hood shooter before the attack last month and praised the carnage afterward, is among those who “were presumed to be at the site,” the Yemeni government statement said.

Al-Awlaki is a U.S. citizen who was born in New Mexico and was tied to mosques in San Diego and Falls Church, Va., before fleeing to Yemen in 2002. His extremist sermons have been cited as a major source of motivation to terrorist suspects tied to a series of disrupted plots in the United States and abroad.

News reports in Yemen indicated that as many as 30 al-Qaida figures were killed in the operation, which was conducted by the Yemeni military with U.S. intelligence support.

Some accounts indicated that the strike was directed at a house owned by the al-Awlaki family about 400 miles southeast of the nation’s capital, but that the cleric’s presence was not confirmed. U.S. military and intelligence officials said it was unclear whether al-Awlaki was at the site, let alone among those injured or killed.

“If they did get Awlaki, he was a bad guy,” said a U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We think it is great that they went after these guys. We are fully on board.”

Al-Awlaki was little known beyond counterterrorism circles until last month, when it was revealed that he had communicated via e-mail with Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. The Army psychiatrist has been charged with 13 counts of murder after gunning down fellow soldiers in a deadly rampage months before he was scheduled to deploy to the war in Afghanistan.

In a recent interview published on Al-Jazeera’s Web site, al-Awlaki said that Hasan had contacted him as early as December 2008, asking for guidance on the religious implications of killing fellow soldiers.

Hasan “was asking about killing U.S. soldiers and officers,” from his first e-mail contact, al-Awlaki said, according to the Al-Jazeera report. “His question was is it legitimate” under Islamic law.

U.S. authorities have said that Hasan and al-Awlaki traded as many as 18 e-mails. Authorities have said the FBI was aware of the correspondence before the shooting, but concluded that Hasan’s inquiries were related to his research as a psychiatrist and saw no cause for alarm.

After the attack, a posting attributed to al-Awlaki on his Web site applauded Hasan’s actions, saying the soldier was “a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.” The posting was titled, “Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing.”