A botched U.S. drone strike along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan inadvertently caused the deaths of two aid workers in al-Qaeda captivity — Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto. The January operation killed Ahmed Farouq, an al-Qaeda leader and U.S. national. The United States also announced that another American citizen with al-Qaeda, Adam Gadahn, was killed in an earlier action that month.
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Weinstein was abducted in 2011 in the Pakistani city of Lahore. The 73-year-old had been working for a company contracted by the U.S. Agency for International Development. During his years in captivity, al-Qaeda released a number of videos featuring Weinstein for his release and asking President Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry to win his freedom.
Speaking to The Washington Post a year and a half ago, his wife, Elaine, described the anguish created by each video. "It just hurts," she . "It's like he's so close and I can't get to him."
After Weinstein's death was announced Thursday, his family issued a new statement, saying it was "devastated by the news" and that it looked forward to an independent investigation into the operation.
"Warren spent his entire life working to benefit people across the globe and loved the work that he did to make people’s lives better," the statement .
Lo Porto, a 39-year-old Italian aid worker who had , was abducted in Pakistan while working for a German charity Welthungerhilfe. He had joined in October 2011, heading up a water sanitation project in the province of Punjab, which along with others parts of the country, had been badly affected by floods the year prior. He was kidnapped in January 2012 from a guest house in the city of Multan.
There was that he would be released after a German colleague captured with him, Bernd Muehlenbeck, was freed last year in Afghanistan.
"I express deep pain for the death of an Italian who dedicated his life serving others," Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said.
Ahmed Farouq, an American national and prominent al-Qaeda operative, was in the compound with hostages Warren Weinstein, an American contractor, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian aid worker, when the compound was struck. U.S. officials that Farouq was not "specifically targeted" in the attack and that they didn't have knowledge that he would be at the site.
There's little known about Farouq. News in January that a drone strike had killed an al-Qaeda emir with his name did not indicate that Farouq was a U.S. national, Long War Journal . The assumption is that he is a Pakistani American.
An American convert to Islam, Adam Gadahn, 36, was raised on a remote farm in California by Protestant parents who themselves had undergone a religious transformation, changing their last name to Gadahn, to the biblical warrior Gideon. Gadahn also lived for a time with his Jewish grandparents.
He is thought to have converted to Islam in 1995. A found that Gadahn's radicalization could have taken place in the shadows of a "placid, middle-class congregation" in the suburbs of Los Angeles, where he fell in with a group of more orthodox, angry young men and even physically assaulted the mosque's chairman in 1997.
He eventually made his way to al-Qaeda's havens in Pakistan and Afghanistan. By the mid-2000s, Gadahn started making prominent appearances in al-Qaeda propaganda videos, calling on Muslims to attack Western interests around the world, and went by the nom de guerre Azzam the American.
As a 2007 profile in , Gadahn began speaking in what might be described as "Jihadlish," blending extremist slogans with American vernacular. "If you die as an unbeliever in battle against the Muslims, you’re going straight to hell, without passing Go," he once declared.
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