Which U.S. citizens were killed by drone strikes under Obama and what were the circumstances?
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Executive summary
Four U.S. citizens were killed in U.S. drone strikes during the Obama administration: Anwar al‑Awlaki (a senior AQAP-linked cleric who was intentionally targeted), and three others—his 16‑year‑old son Abdulrahman, Samir Khan, and Jude Mohammed—whom the administration later said were not specifically targeted in the strikes that killed them [1] [2] [3].
1. Anwar al‑Awlaki — the one U.S. citizen the administration says it targeted
Anwar al‑Awlaki, born in the United States and described by the Obama administration as an operational leader of al‑Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011 after a targeting process that the administration says involved senior executive‑branch review; his killing was explicitly justified by U.S. officials as a deliberate lethal action against an American citizen engaged in terrorist operations [4] [3].
2. Abdulrahman al‑Awlaki — a 16‑year‑old U.S. citizen killed days later
Abdulrahman Anwar al‑Awlaki, the 16‑year‑old son of Anwar al‑Awlaki and also a U.S. citizen, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen on October 14, 2011; his death prompted legal and human‑rights criticism because he was a minor and because U.S. forces struck in a country that was not formally an active theater of war, raising questions about the reach of the administration’s lethal‑force authorities and transparency about who was targeted and why [5] [6].
3. Samir Khan and Jude Mohammed — named among the four, described as not specifically targeted
Samir Khan and Jude Mohammed were named by public reporting and fact‑checks as among the four U.S. citizens killed in strikes during the Obama years; Attorney General Eric Holder later told Congress that three of the four Americans killed were “not specifically targeted,” a characterization tied by analysts to the strikes that killed Abdulrahman, Khan and Jude Mohammed rather than the al‑Awlaki senior strike [1] [2].
4. Official admissions, numbers, and contested accounts
The Obama administration publicly acknowledged that four American citizens had been killed by U.S. drone strikes since 2009 and said only one of those citizens was intentionally targeted, a disclosure reflected in Department of Justice and administration statements and reported contemporaneously [3] [2]; independent trackers and rights groups dispute many aspects of official tallies, and broader casualty figures for the drone campaign—hundreds to thousands killed and widely varying civilian‑casualty estimates—remain contested [7] [8] [9].
5. Legal and moral debate surrounding those deaths
The killing of a U.S. citizen outside an active battlefield prompted intense legal debate over due process, the executive branch’s authority to approve lethal force against Americans abroad, and the opacity of legal memoranda justifying such strikes; critics and civil‑rights groups argued the killings revealed an alarming executive reach and inconsistent accountability, while administration defenders invoked national‑security necessity and a tightly controlled review process [4] [2] [6].
6. What the public record does — and does not — show
Contemporaneous reporting, congressional statements and later analyses converge on the factual core that four named U.S. citizens died in U.S. strikes under Obama and that only Anwar al‑Awlaki was publicly acknowledged as an intentional target; beyond those named cases, the public record is limited by classification, disputed casualty methodologies, and differing counts by independent monitors, so assertions beyond the four‑name list and the administration’s characterization require careful caveats [1] [2] [9].