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Made in the U.S.A. So who is this man whom U.S. counterterrorism officials would like to see dead? Just like bin Laden, al-Awlaki comes from an influential family: one of his relatives is Prime Minister of Yemen, and his father Nasser al-Awlaki was Agriculture Minister and head of the country's biggest university. Like bin Laden, al-Awlaki is soft-spoken, mild-mannered and austere...
...parallels end there. Although bin Laden saw plenty of Western culture in his youth, he seems to have been profoundly uncomfortable with it. Not so al-Awlaki. Now 38, he has lived in the West for more than half his life, speaks fluent English and peppers his sermons with references to Western places and people. A recent lecture on death, for instance, was informed by an old Michael Jackson interview in which the singer said he wanted to "live forever." Hard to imagine bin Laden referring to the King of Pop in a sermon...
...Al-Awlaki was born in 1971 in Las Cruces, N.M., where his father was studying for a master's degree at New Mexico State University. The family spent nearly a decade on American campuses. Anwar was 7 when they returned to Yemen, where they lived in a newish Sana'a neighborhood...
...Yemeni government scholarship allowed Anwar to return to the U.S.; in 1991 he enrolled in Colorado State University's civil-engineering program. Friends remember al-Awlaki as a low-key young man who lived modestly in a one-bedroom apartment and drove around Fort Collins in a beat-up old Buick. He prayed at the Islamic Center of Fort Collins but did not stand out as being especially religious and was not active in CSU's Muslim students association...
When he visited Afghanistan in 1993, a journey that fired thousands of young Muslim men with jihadist zeal, the Soviet occupation had ended, and al-Awlaki was depressed by poverty and hunger in the homes where he stayed. "My impression was that he didn't like it there," says Abdul Belgasem, a fellow student at CSU. "He wouldn't have gone with al-Qaeda. He didn't like the way they lived." But at some point, al-Awlaki must have had something of a spiritual awakening. After graduating in 1994, he set aside civil engineering and applied to be imam...