IRAQ: From the moment Colin Powell named him as an al-Qaeda associate in a February 2003 speech making the case for invading Iraq, Zarqawi became the larger than life villain of the war, writes Mary Fitzgerald
There was a story Abu Musab al-Zarqawi liked to tell his cellmates during the long days he spent in Jordan's Swaqa prison. It was the story of a dream his sister had one night, in which she saw a sword fall from the sky. The blade was engraved with his name on one side, the word "jihad" on the other.
"He took it very seriously," Yousef Rababa, one of al-Zarqawi's fellow prisoners, told The Irish Times. "The thing he wanted most in life was to go to paradise as a proud shahid (martyr). He was obsessed with finding the place where he could fight for Islam and die a shahid. He found it in Iraq."
The tale of the petty criminal who found God before fighting first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq was to become so embroidered with myth and propaganda that even his own family barely recognised him as one of the world's most wanted men.
From the moment Colin Powell named him as an al-Qaeda associate in a February 2003 speech making the case for invading Iraq, Zarqawi became the larger than life villain of the war. Accused of masterminding a vicious campaign of bombings, kidnappings, suicide attacks and video-taped beheadings, his was the very face of a shadowy insurgency. But while the US offered a $25 million bounty for his capture, sceptics wondered if Zarqawi had become an all too convenient bogeyman. In April the Washington Post reported that the US military was running a propaganda campaign to magnify Zarqawi's role in the insurgency.
It claimed some intelligence officials were concerned that the Jordanian militant's importance may have been overstated in a bid to link the war to al-Qaeda.
Born Ahmed Fadel Nazzal al-Khalayleh almost 40 years ago, Zarqawi grew up on the mean streets of Zarqa, a dusty industrial city to the north of Jordan's capital Amman.
Neighbours remember him as a school drop-out who soon developed a reputation as a brawler and "muskalgee" (troublemaker).
His cousin Yousef was kinder in his description: "He was a fairly normal guy but if someone challenged him, he could defend himself. He wasn't religious as a young man but after he got married it was different. He started to pray and his life changed."
Months after his marriage in the late 1980s, Zarqawi left to join the final stages of the battle against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. Huthaifa Azzam, son of Osama Bin Laden's jihadist mentor Abdullah Azzam, remembers meeting him in the border town of Peshawar. "He was a street guy who had only just returned to Allah but he was a brave fighter," Azzam told The Irish Times.
"We never saw anything like him but he had what we call a dead heart. It was as if he had no heart at all."
Proud of his impoverished home town, the Jordanian soon adopted the title Al-Zarqawi (meaning "the one from Zarqa") as his nom de guerre. Radicalised, like so many others, by his Afghan experience, Zarqawi returned to Jordan in 1992.
By then he had subscribed to an austere and rigid interpretation of Islam known as Salafism. Accused of plotting to overthrow the monarchy, he spent seven years in prison until his release under a royal amnesty in 1999. In jail he surrounded himself with a coterie of like-minded inmates while memorising the Koran and imposing strict discipline. "It was like his own miniature kingdom," Abdullah Abu Rumman, a Jordanian journalist imprisoned at the same time for criticising the government, told The Irish Times. "He was very strong and very tough with his followers."
Zarqawi left Jordan on his release, flitting between jihadi training camps in Afghanistan before surfacing in Iraq as leader of the Tawhid and Jihad insurgent group. He merged that organisation with the al-Qaeda network in late 2004.
Apart from his operations in Iraq, Zarqawi claimed responsibility for several terror attacks in Jordan, including a plot to cause a chemical explosion in 2004, the murder of US aid worker Laurence Foley in 2002 and a triple suicide bombing in Amman that left 60 people dead last November.
The Amman bombings were considered a turning point in terms of Zarqawi's standing, earning him rebukes from within the insurgency and routing much of the tacit support he previously held in his homeland.
Before that, however, many believed the insurgency had largely escaped any control Zarqawi ever had of it.
Whatever the truth behind the story of the small-town thug who appears to have achieved the notoriety and martyrdom he craved in Iraq, one thing is certain: Iraq's chaos will not end with his death.