© unknownAnwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was a so called radical cleric and one of the most influential al-Qaeda operatives wanted by the U.S., was killed in September in an airstrike in northern Yemen.
In the days before a CIA drone strike killed
al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki last month, his 16-year-old son ran away from the family home in Yemen's capital of Sanaa to try to find him, relatives say. When he, too, was killed in a U.S. airstrike Friday, the Awlaki family decided to speak out for the first time since the attacks.
"To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It's nonsense," said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki's father and the boy's grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. "They want to justify his killing, that's all."
The teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin
were killed in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen.
The young Awlaki was the third American killed in Yemen in as many weeks.
Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina, died alongside Anwar al-Awlaki.
Comment: The stress and hopelessness that the Greeks are feeling at this time are understandable, but there is a simple way to help us distress so that we can see what solutions lie ahead of us and act towards helping ourselves and those we care about, despite any national financial crisis. If you, or someone you know, live in Greece, direct them to this website, where they can learn how to bring their nervous system in a relaxation mode and healing to their mind and soul, using breathing and meditation techniques. The site can viewed in Greek and the program is online for free.
As Greek poet Odysseas Elytis said in his Nobel Prize speech in 1979: We can start by constructing healthy selves: in body, mind and heart.