The controversial US Agency for International Development (USAID) shelled out thousands to send an al-Qaeda terrorist with ties to 9/11 hijackers to college in America decades ago – an education he used to help recruit and groom terrorists for future attacks on US soil.
President Trump ordered USAID to be dismantled after finding it wasted billions on lefty schemes in recent years — from drag shows in Ecuador to an Iraqi version of “Sesame Street” and aid to the Middle East that made their way into the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah.
But the recently resurfaced terrorist full-ride suggests to critics that the rot has been there for years.
American-born jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki received “full funding” to attend Colorado State University in 1990, USAID documents obtained by Fox News show.
President Barack Obama ordered him killed in a US airstrike in Yemen 20 years later.
And the documents revealed that al-Awlaki – who was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico –
lied on his application and claimed that he was born in Yemen, apparently so he would be eligible for the federal tuition funding worth more than $27,000 at the time. (Tuition and fees for an international student at the Fort Collins-based public university would be nearly 10 times that today.)
Using the education USAID provided him – he earned a bachelor’s in civil engineering in 1994 — al-Awlaki would go on to teach Islam at mosques across the country from Denver to San Diego and Virginia, where US officials believe he used his platform to radicalize and recruit terrorists.
It was at a San Diego Mosque where he met 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar – two of the men who flew Flight 77 into the Pentagon that morning in 2001, killing 190 people – and by 2006 he was arrested in Yemen on suspicion of terrorist ties.
Three years later he was communicating with the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan — who gunned down 13 people at the Texas Army base — and was also tied to “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas day 2009 with bombs hidden in his shorts.
Al-Awlaki was killed in a US airstrike ordered by Obama in 2011 in Yemen, months after he was declared a “specially designated global terrorist.” The hit was controversial with civil rights groups at the time, since it was the first killing of an American in a targeted strike.
It has long been known al-Awlaki was educated in the US, but the recent scrutiny of USAID’s far-reaching and often frivolous spending by the Trump administration has thrown a new light on its part in educating a terrorist.
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USAID reportedly bankrolled al Qaeda terrorist’s college tuition, unearthed records show Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike during the Obama administration.
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The document was first unearthed by George Washington University’s National Security Archive in 2015.
“This form, dated 1990, confirms that Anwar al-Awlaki was qualified for an exchange visa and that
USAID was providing ‘full funding’ for his studies at Colorado State University,” the National Security Archive said at the time.
“The document lists Anwar’s birthplace incorrectly as Sanaa, Yemen’s capital,
which he later said was a deliberate falsehood offered at the urging of American officials who knew his father so that he could qualify for a scholarship reserved for foreign citizens,” according to the archive.
And al-Awlaki’s cushy tuition ride is just the latest incident of USAID funds paying for America’s terrorist enemies that’s turned up since the Trump administration started cracking down on state spending.
Upwards of $100 million in grants from USAID and the state department have been given to terror-aligned organizations, according to a recent study from the Middle East Forum think tank – including “millions” that have been funneled directly into Hamas-controlled organizations in Gaza.
“USAID beneficiaries have called for their lands to be ‘cleansed’ from the ‘impurity of the Jews,’ among dozens of other chilling examples,” the report found, citing groups like the “Gaza-based terror charity” Bayader Association for Environment and Development which received funding from 2016 through the days before the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Fox News reported.
Other grants include an unknown amount to the Hamas-controlled Unlimited Friends Association in Gaza, which the Middle East Forum said is run by a director who espouses goals to “cleanse” Gaza of “impure Jews.”
USAID spending continued in Gaza and the West Bank under the Biden Administration, even as the government deemed it “high risk” that it would fall into terrorist hands.
