by Joby Warrick
Maqdisi’s detachment from the other inmates had deepened during the months in al-Jafr. As the day of his release approached, he talked about returning to his family and his writing; about expanding his audience throughout the Muslim world while taking care to avoid the kind of offense that could land him back in prison.
Zarqawi, on the other hand, was torn between two families: the one in Zarqa and the one he had gained in jail. His al-Jafr brothers were a cadre of men devoted to him personally and willing to follow him anywhere. With the amnesty, the survival of this family was suddenly in doubt.
Sabha, the prison doctor, was away on the evening when Zarqawi and the others departed for Amman. The release of so many prisoners under the amnesty meant a much lighter workload, and the prison staff was abuzz with rumors that the entire facility would soon be shut down for good. The morning after the release, Sabha arrived for his shift early and stopped by the warden’s office for coffee and the latest news. Colonel Ibrahim greeted him with a strange look.
“Our friend has come back,” he said.
The warden led the doctor through the courtyard toward the Islamists’ cell, which now held only a handful of inmates who had committed violent offenses and were ineligible for the pardon. As they approached, Sabha could see a bearded man standing at the doorway, talking to the prisoners through the bars. It was Zarqawi.
“He has been here since five-thirty this morning,” the warden said.
Zarqawi had traveled all the way to Amman, visited his mother in Zarqa for a few hours, then turned around and driven through the night in a friend’s car to arrive at al-Jafr before daybreak. Now here he was, back inside the hated prison, ministering to other inmates like a field commander checking the morale of his troops.
Sabha watched for a moment in disbelief.
“Here,” he said afterward, “was a real leader.
“I knew at that moment that I would be hearing about him,” he said. “This man was going to end up either famous, or dead.”
3
“A problem like that always comes back”
Six months after regaining his freedom, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi strode into the departures lounge of Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport with a plan to escape Jordan for good. He carried a freshly minted Jordanian passport, No. Z393834, along with a Pakistani visa stamp and a serviceable cover story: Zarqawi, the war veteran and ex-convict, was going into business as an international honey merchant.
He had thought to bring along his mother, the fifty-year-old Dallah al-Khalayleh, a useful prop for someone trying to pass as a simple businessman looking for partners for his apiarist venture. Notably absent were his wife and his three children. Zarqawi’s true destination was no place for a young family; besides, he already had plans for picking up a second wife once he had settled.
But he hadn’t anticipated the reception the Mukhabarat had prepared for him.
As he approached the gate, several large men in dark suits grabbed Zarqawi by the shoulder and quickly hustled him into a side room, leaving his exasperated mother spluttering in the corridor. Minutes later, he was sitting in the spy agency’s headquarters, visibly struggling to contain his rage.
“I didn’t do anything!” he protested. “Why did you stop me?”
The man who sat opposite Zarqawi had by now interrogated the jihadist so many times he could practically deliver his lines for him. Abu Haytham, the intelligence-service captain then in his fifteenth year in the Mukhabarat’s counterterrorism division, had followed Zarqawi’s preparations for weeks and arranged for the predeparture “chat.” He had never been impressed with Zarqawi, regarding him as another Islamist hothead, louder and more aggressive than most, but lacking in the kinds of intellectual or organizational talents that might make him exceptionally dangerous. But now Zarqawi was leaving Jordan through an obviously concocted scheme. What exactly was he up to?
Zarqawi had been right about one thing: he had committed no criminal offense, at least nothing of a magnitude that would warrant a dramatic scene in front of his mother and the scores of airport passengers. But the Mukhabarat wasn’t about to let him slink away easily. His prison stint had only hardened his views and expanded his network of possible co-conspirators. And now he had a plane ticket to Peshawar, Pakistan, gateway to the Hindu Kush Mountains and, just beyond them, Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan. The Saudi terrorist had blown up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and declared war on the United States.
The captain had yet to divine Zarqawi’s true plans, but he was certain they had nothing to do with raising honeybees in Pakistan’s northwestern mountains. If Zarqawi were to link up with terrorists, it could come back to haunt Jordan.
“You can’t just push him off on others,” Abu Haytham would explain to colleagues. “Sooner or later, a problem like that always comes back.”
Legally, Abu Haytham could detain Zarqawi for three days while the Mukhabarat’s agents searched his belongings and quizzed his relatives and associates. In reality, the spy service could hold him as long as it wanted to. Zarqawi, still straining to keep his anger in check as he waited in the spy agency’s interrogation cell, knew this as well as anyone. But Abu Haytham reminded him anyway.
“As the security service,” he said, “it is our duty to know what you’re doing.”
—
Zarqawi had not always been so pliant. Abu Haytham’s first encounter with the man then known as Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh was an adrenaline-infused struggle, and very nearly proved fatal.
On March 29, 1994, Abu Haytham was part of a team of fourteen heavily armed officers who raided an apartment where Zarqawi was staying. At the time, the intelligence service was rolling up a cell of Afghan war veterans connected to what appeared to be a serious terrorist plot. Members of the cell—all with ties to a radical preacher, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi—had acquired land mines and antitank rockets and were preparing to attack Israeli soldiers at one of the border crossings with Jordan. A known leader of the cell was Zarqawi, then a twenty-seven-year-old Afghan war veteran who worked as a video-store clerk and spent his free time meeting secretly with small groups of Islamic radicals. As other cell members disappeared into the Mukhabarat’s prison, Zarqawi had moved from his house to the apartment to make arrangements to flee Jordan. He was finalizing his escape plan just as Abu Haytham and the other officers gathered in an alley behind the building to prepare for the assault.
The agents had watched the apartment throughout the day to see when Zarqawi would come home, and then waited for hours after the lights went out. At 1:00 a.m., using a key secured from the landlord, they quietly slid back the deadbolt and began creeping up the stairs. They found Zarqawi alone in a back room, dead-asleep.
The men had reached the foot of the bed when Zarqawi jerked awake. He swore at the strangers and thrust a hand behind his pillow, as if to grab something.
“Gun!” one of the officers shouted.
A wall of men fell on top of Zarqawi and struggled to pin him, while another in the raiding party snatched the weapon. It was then that one of the team’s members noticed an odd stirring behind a drapery. He lunged instinctively and tackled a second man, an Egyptian who, fortunately for the officers, had not been armed.
“We didn’t know there was another person in the house,” Abu Haytham explained afterward. “We found him only because the curtain was moving and there was no window behind it.”
The agents tossed the pistol—an M15 automatic, with three loaded clips—into their van along with the cursing suspects. Zarqawi—still “ready to kill,” as one of them later described him—sat glowering at the agents from the backseat, with his tangle of matted hair and torn nightshirt, tattoos poking out below the sleeve.
“He was angry, just screaming curses: ‘You are kafirs. You are infidels,” the officer recalled.
Then it was back to the Mukhabarat’s fortresslike headquarters for the interrogation. Among those looking in on the suspects was Samih Battikhi, t
he agency’s worldly, silver-maned deputy chief. He watched as his men, working in a small, glaringly lit cell, tried in turns to wear the suspect down. Zarqawi was having none of it, he recalled.
“He just spouted ideology. His head was full of it,” Battikhi said.
Battikhi, who would soon be named director of the spy agency, had been watching with growing unease the stream of Jordanian nationals returning home after fighting under the mujahideen army’s Islamist banner in Afghanistan. At first, he recalled, the Jordanians who volunteered for duty in Afghanistan “were the good guys, fighting the communists,” in ideological lockstep with the country’s most important allies, including the Americans, the British, and the Saudis. Now they were returning home as combat veterans with radically different views, and even different ways of speaking and dressing. Zarqawi looked and sounded like the others, but with an aggressiveness that reminded Battikhi of a caged animal. It was widely known that Zarqawi had been a vicious brawler and petty criminal as a youth. Battikhi now wondered if the two parts of his personality had fused together—the gangster and the religious fanatic.
“He didn’t fit the profile,” Battikhi said. “Here’s a guy who had been a thug and a drunk. His family had gotten worried and tried to steer him toward religious groups to straighten him out. But then it was like he went too straight. So now you’ve got the worst of both worlds.”
—
In fact, the Mukhabarat knew a lot about Zarqawi, even in those early days before prison. Between his thick police file and the spy agency’s legions of informants, the officers were quickly able to fill in the remaining blanks.
Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, as the records showed, had been troubled since childhood, taking the hard path from vandalism to drugs and alcohol to more serious crimes. He was born October 30, 1966, to parents of working-class Jordanian stock: a civil-servant father who worked for Zarqa’s municipal government, and a devoutly religious mother who doted on the young boy above his seven sisters and two brothers. The family lived in a modest two-story house perched on a hill above a large cemetery where Zarqa’s working class buries its dead. The graveyard is a shambles, a few thousand crumbling, hand-lettered tombstones strewn across a sloping lot overrun with weeds and feral cats; it is also the closest thing in the neighborhood to a public park. The boy who would become Abu Musab al-Zarqawi spent countless hours playing in the cemetery as a child; later, when he was a teen, the graves became the backdrop for his first forays into delinquency and crime.
The Khalaylehs came from a large and respectable East Bank tribe, the Bani Hassans, a biographical fact that normally carried certain advantages for a young man looking to make connections and find work in a patriarchal society like Jordan. But Zarqawi had blown one opportunity after another. He dropped out of high school, despite above-average grades and test scores showing an aptitude for art. He skated through two years of compulsory military service, but then got himself fired from a city job his father had arranged for him. His criminal career began at age twelve—he had cut a neighborhood boy in a street fight—and progressed to pimping, drug dealing, and assault. By his late teens, he had acquired tattoos and a reputation as a heavy drinker and street tough who took pleasure in brutalizing his victims and opponents with fist or blade. His idea of a sexual conquest—according to security officials and to acquaintances who knew him at the time—was to force himself on younger men as a way to humiliate and assert his own dominance.
He was twenty-one when he married his cousin, Intisar, who quickly bore him a daughter. But Zarqawi’s great love remained his mother. Dallah al-Khalayleh fretted over her troubled youngest son, but she never stopped believing in his basic goodness, or gave up her certitude that he would make something of himself. She also understood her son’s intellectual limitations. Years later, when journalists would show up at her house to ask about Zarqawi’s reported accomplishments as a terrorist commander and bomb maker, she would seem genuinely amused.
“He wasn’t that smart,” she told an American reporter. She allowed that her boy was “committed to Islam,” but explained his decision to join a jihadist movement as the only option available to a young man who couldn’t find a real job at home.
“My son is a good man, an ordinary man, a victim of injustice,” she said.
It was his mother who nudged Zarqawi into joining the Islamists. She signed him up for religion classes at the local al-Husayn Ben Ali Mosque, hoping he would find better role models among the imams and pious youth, with their theological debates and fundraising drives to benefit Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan. To everyone’s surprise, Zarqawi plunged into Islam with all the passion he had once reserved for his criminal pursuits. He swore off drinking and became a regular at Koran discussions and Friday prayers. He devoured propaganda videos and audiocassettes on the sectarian wars being fought in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. And when the prayer leader at the local mosque asked for volunteers to fight against the communist oppressors of Afghanistan’s Muslims, Zarqawi’s hand shot up.
He arrived at the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier in the spring of 1989, weeks after the last Soviet troops withdrew, but just in time to join the Islamist assault on the pro-Moscow Afghan government that was left to fend for itself after the Russians pulled out. One of the Afghan veterans who greeted him at the airport would later remember a wiry young man who seemed eager but also oddly self-conscious. He said little, explaining at one point that he was embarrassed to speak, fearing he would betray his inadequate schooling and thin grasp of the Koran. Although it was already hot, he insisted on wearing long sleeves to cover up his tattoos.
“We all knew who he was: he had been this notorious tough guy in Zarqa,” said Hudhaifa Azzam, a fellow Afghan-fighter and son of the influential Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, regarded by many as the father of the global jihad movement. “Now he had found religion, and he was very much ashamed of his tattoos. You could see him covering up his hands self-consciously.”
Zarqawi’s first assignment was to write articles for a jihadist magazine describing mujahideen exploits on the battlefield, a job that proved taxing for a young man of limited schooling. Among his first friends was Saleh al-Hami, a fellow journalist who had lost his leg to a land mine. Zarqawi spent long hours at the man’s bedside as he recovered, becoming so impressed with his devotion that he arranged to have one of his own sisters flown to Pakistan to marry the man. His new brother-in-law would later move to Jordan to become Zarqawi’s admiring biographer. Al-Hami remembered the young Zarqawi as highly emotional, and quick to cry whenever he read the Koran. Most of the Arab fighters tried to avoid such open displays, but not the Jordanian.
“Zarqawi was crying whenever he said prayers aloud, even when leading the prayers,” al-Hami wrote.
During breaks in training, Zarqawi wandered around the Pakistani city of Peshawar, sometimes visiting a local mosque that had become a favorite for Arab fighters. Years later, the mosque’s imam still vividly remembered the earnest young Jordanian who seemed preoccupied with past sins. One day, after the cleric mentioned his plans to travel to Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, Zarqawi approached him with a request.
“If you are to go on pilgrimage,” the youth said, “on your way there, pray to God that he may forgive Abu Musab.”
Zarqawi’s first taste of actual combat came in 1991, when mujahideen rebels launched an offensive against government-held towns in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces of Paktia and Khost. Zarqawi fought with enthusiasm, and quickly gained a reputation for bravery bordering on foolhardiness, comrades remembered. Once, according to Azzam, he single-handedly held off a column of a dozen or more Afghan government troops during fighting in the eastern city of Gardez, allowing time for others in his unit to escape.
“He was so brave, I used to say he had a dead heart,” Azzam said. As Azzam recalled it, Zarqawi’s heroics appeared to go beyond mere risk taking. He seemed at times to be trying to purge himself of something.
“I was struc
k by the way his past seemed to affect him, as he always struggled with a sense of guilt,” Azzam said. “I think that is why he was so brave. He would say, ‘Because of the things I did in my past, nothing could bring Allah to forgive me unless I become a shahid’—a martyr.”
Zarqawi would never be a martyr, but in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan he earned his credentials as a mujahid—a holy warrior. By the time he left Afghanistan in 1993, he was a combat veteran with a few years of battlefield experience. He had been steeped in the doctrine of militant Islam, learning at the feet of radical Afghan and Arab clerics who would later ally themselves with the Taliban or with Osama bin Laden. He had gained formal military training at a camp operated by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Afghan rebel commander who would also mentor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
Like the other Afghan fighters, he had also drunk from the heady cocktail of battlefield camaraderie and the rebels’ own improbable success. A ragtag army of Afghans and Islamist volunteers had humbled the Soviet superpower. How could such a thing be explained, except as an act of divine intervention?
“God granted the Muslim mujahidin in Afghanistan victory against the infidels,” declared Sayf al-Adel, a deputy to Osama bin Laden, in a written account of the war. It was an opinion widely held among the veterans, and Zarqawi was utterly convinced of its truth.
—
In 1993, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and hundreds of other Jordanian veterans returned home to a country they barely recognized. But it wasn’t only Jordan that had changed. In four years, while Amman and the other big towns had grown larger and more modern, Zarqawi and his comrades had traveled backward in time by journeying to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a place that by almost every measure lagged centuries behind the rest of the world.