He's the terrorist mastermind with a $25m bounty on his head. Last week rumours swept Iraq that he had been gravely wounded. But no one's really sure where he is, or even who he is
Paul Harris Sunday May 29, 2005 The Observer
He is an American nightmare, an Islamic mass killer who haunts the national psyche. He has masterminded a bombing campaign in Iraq that has cost hundreds of innocent lives. He has a $25 million bounty on his head and is blamed for terrorist atrocities that span the globe. He is Abu Musab Zarqawi.
No single name emerging from the war on terror, perhaps not even Osama bin Laden himself, now dominates the headlines as much as Zarqawi. Certainly not in the past week. Accounts are confused, but it seems Zarqawi has been injured in Iraq. Perhaps he is even dead. Rumours have been flying across the internet and front pages. There have been hospital sightings, stories of a dying leader being smuggled across the border and the beginnings of a fight for a successor. No one knows what is true. Zarqawi has been pronounced dead before and always come back to the fight. Perhaps this time it will be different. Perhaps not (the latest rumours have him alive and back in control).
Only two things are certain. First, the one-time street thug from a Jordanian slum town is now America's number one target. Second, if he dies, the Iraqi insurgency will carry on without him. For Zarqawi did not create the war in Iraq. Rather, Iraq's war gave him his chance. Zarqawi's story is of a man who seized an opportunity to practise mayhem, honing his dreadful talent on the killing fields of the Sunni Triangle.
Zarqawi was put up by America as a terrorist bogeyman long before he had the profile to justify it. Much of the world first heard his name in Colin Powell's speech to the UN when he was used to link al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi was held up as key to making the case for America's invasion of Iraq. Ever since, in his own blood-stained way, he has been making the case against.
Yet Zarqawi remains a shadowy figure. Even his name is not real. His nom de guerre is simply a homage to his home town of Zarqa, a poor town about half-an-hour's drive from Amman. His real name is the more wordy Ahmad Fadeel Nazal Khalayleh. He was born in 1966, possibly on 20 October, to a father who was a retired Jordanian army officer. Their house was a two-storey concrete construction overlooking the chimneys of a city dubbed Jordan's Detroit for its car industry (and its crime). Like so much of Zarqawi's life, a close examination sees certainty evaporate. No wonder US Marines scouring Fallujah or Ramadi cannot find him. Many of his fellow Islamists see him as a ghost-like figure, always eluding the net. In trying to piece together his life, they sometimes seem to have a point.
When Powell first described Zarqawi, he said he was of Palestinian origin. It is a mistake often repeated. But those trying to explain Zarqawi's blood lust by using the Palestinian tragedy are scouring the wrong ground. In fact his family belong to the Beni Hassan tribe of Bedouin, a long-established Jordanian group that is usually loyal to Jordan's ruling monarch.
Nothing in his childhood hinted at what he was going to become. His father died in 1984, leaving the large family to struggle on a meagre army pension. Zarqawi quickly became a tearaway. He spent his time scrapping and playing football in Zarqa's dusty streets and surprised no one by dropping out of school aged 17.
He drifted into casual crime as an enforcer and general-purpose thug. At some time, he was imprisoned for sexual assault. On the streets, he learnt the art of violence. It was a lesson he learnt well and used to dramatic effect when he hacked off the head of American engineer Nick Berg in the first terrorist 'snuff video' to emerge from Iraq.
Indeed, much of his violence has a street crime feel to it. It is brutal, direct, unflinching and unthinking. Not for Zarqawi the press interviews with Westerners that bin Laden once gave. Not for Zarqawi the pampered Saudi childhood. Not for Zarqawi the meandering meditations on Islamic theory as a justification for murder. If Zarqawi and his network are eclipsing bin Laden and al-Qaeda, as some terrorist experts believe, then it is a form of terrorism that betrays its roots in Zarqa's brutish underworld, not some austere Arabian seminary.
Zarqawi's criminal career exposed him to Jordan's Palestinian refugee camps. Wallowing in crime, the camps also suffered from a different affliction: radical Islam. At some stage, Zarqawi the thug began to change into Zarqawi the militant. It was an unexpected transformation. Even his family were surprised when, after marrying a maternal cousin, he suddenly moved to Afghanistan in 1989. Zarqawi hoped to fight the Russians, but he was too late - they were leaving. Instead, he ended up as a reporter of an Islamist newsletter, interviewing veterans of the war and listening to tales of Jihadist glory.
While working in Peshawar, Zarqawi met Mohammed Maqdisi, a Jordanian preacher of the radical Salafist sect. Zarqawi's militancy began to evolve. Like everything Zarqawi did, whether violence or belief, he took it to extremes. He returned with Maqdisi to Jordan and they spoke out against the government and hoarded arms. Soon, they were in jail, with Zarqawi catching a 15-year sentence.
But prison, as is so often the case, honed Zarqawi's beliefs. He and Maqdisi became the focal point of Islamic inmates. Zarqawi fashioned blankets over his iron bunk bed to create a sort of 'cave' where he would read the Koran endlessly. He forbade other prisoners to read anything else. He had his un-Islamic tattoos removed (shedding the last reminders of his old street life).
He meted out violent punishments to those who disobeyed him. 'Either you were with them [Zarqawi and Maqdisi] or you were an enemy. There was no grey area,' recalled Youssef Rababa'a, who spent three years in the same jail.
Zarqawi's story should have ended behind bars. But, in a sweeping amnesty in 1999, he was released. It was a catastrophic mistake. Some associates have described him wanting to buy a truck and open a vegetable stall but being prevented from doing so by the attentions of Jordan's security forces. More likely, he simply carried on his radical activities. Either way (after apparently helping to plot an attack on a Western hotel in Amman), Zarqawi fled to Afghanistan and took his mother, believing the mountain air would be good for her leukemia.
He entered the network of terror camps set up by bin Laden and hosted by the Taliban, but Zarqawi did not join al-Qaeda. Instead, he used their contacts and money to set up his own camp, near Herat, and his own organisation called Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War). The group specialised in smuggling Islamic militants. That experience would prove vital in allowing Zarqawi to recruit foreign fighters into Iraq after Saddam's fall. It would allow him to assume a role as their leader, bringing them over, giving them support, sending them on suicide missions. It would give him a chance to lead his own war after missing out in Afghanistan.
That chance came in Iraq. 'Iraq gave him a tremendous platform,' said Matthew Levitt, director of terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East policy. But Zarqawi's arrival in Iraq was by accident, not design. As the Americans overthrew the Taliban, Zarqawi fled to Iran. American pressure soon forced him to move again. He ended up in the mountains of northern Iraq with a group of Kurdish Islamic guerrillas called Ansar Islam. Hostile to both Saddam and the West, the small band of fighters had been largely ignored by the world.
Because they were Islamic militants based in Iraq, even though not in an area controlled by Baghdad, and linked, however tangentially, to bin Laden, the Americans felt more confident about trusting unsubstantiated material from dubious sources that alleged a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Powell used it to the full, pushing Zarqawi as a terrorist supremo and claiming he was developing chemical weapons at the Ansar camp. We know now there was no such link and that the chemical weapons programme was amateurish.
From that time on, he was a huge figure in the subsequent invasion and insurgency. He stoked the chaos of the war to bring Iraq and America to where they are now, trapped in a cycle of violence. His seemingly never-ending supply of suicide bombers wreaks havoc. The flow of militants his network smuggles in has never dried up. Often, the targets are simply Shias, whom Zarqawi's unbendingly blind faith views as apostates and traitors.
He uses all his street fighting tricks to stay ahead of the game. He is rumoured never to sleep for long in the same place; he uses a cell-phone once before throwing it away; he rarely sees his family.
He and his network have now been linked to many terrorist atrocities across the world, including the train attacks in Madrid and the assasination of American diplomat Laurence Foley. Some accusations are probably true, others not. Zarqawi has become a catch-all villain for many aspects of the war on terror, especially as the hunt for him intensifies and the search for bin Laden wanes.
What is in little doubt is his dreadful legacy: the ongoing war. When his mother died this year, a family friend told reporters her last desire was that her son would perish in battle and not be captured by Americans. If Zarqawi is indeed dead, then she now has her wish.
But Zarqawi will have his, too. 'When he dies, the situation in Iraq will most likely remain the same,' said Levitt. The problem for the Americans (and for the world) is that his masterpiece of terror in Iraq has been all too successful. It will live long after him. The bombs will not stop.
Abu Musab Zarqawi
DoB: 20 October 1966 (probably) in Zarqa, Jordan (probably)
Real name: Fadeel Nazal Khalayeh
Education: On the streets of Zarqa, in Palestinian refugee camps, and in prison
Job: Leader of Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War)