ZARQA, Jordan – The Muslim extremist believed responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks on civilians and soldiers in Iraq was ruthless, uncompromising and fiercely certain of his violent interpretation of Islam while in prison, say Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi’s former cellmates.
The ideological seeds of what one Western diplomat estimates is al-Zarqawi’s 2,000-strong army of fighters in Iraq today can be found in the time he led a prison gang during the late 1990s while serving time for allegedly trying to topple the Jordanian government.
“Al-Zarqawi was a simple, but a dangerous man,” said Yousef Rababaa, who shared al-Zarqawi’s cell block in Jordan for three years until 1999. “You just don’t come near him if you don’t buy his bigoted gospel.”
Rababaa said al-Zarqawi led a fanatical group of about 20 prisoners known as al-Tawhid, which refers to the central Islamic tenet of monotheism and is similar to the name al-Zarqawi initially used for his fighters in Iraq. The rhetoric was meant to evoke a pure ideal of Islam, one al-Zarqawi believed was worth killing to protect and spread.
Rababaa headed a rival prison group espousing the need to purge Muslim lands of foreign occupiers, but al-Zarqawi didn’t consider him militant enough. Rababaa said al-Zarqawi tried to persuade him to join his group, and when he failed, “labeled me an ‘infidel.’”
“I knew my adversary as a man who neither pursued the path of reconciliation nor was able to maneuver because of his background and his limited thinking,” Rababaa said.
Rababaa, 35, was sentenced to life in jail in 1996 for plotting terrorism against Israeli targets in Jordan, but like al-Zarqawi, he was freed under a royal amnesty in 1999.
Al-Zarqawi recently pledged his allegiance to al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and changed the name of his fighters to Al-Qaida in Iraq.
Even before the U.S.-led war started in March 2003, Jordan had evidence al-Zarqawi was in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan, said Ali Abul-Ragheb, who was then Jordan’s prime minister. The security official said Jordan notified Iraq, but got no response, apparently because now-ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might have wished to enlist al-Zarqawi’s support in the looming war.
The United States has a $25 million bounty on al-Zarqawi’s head, equal to the reward for bin Laden.
A thug turns to religion
Now 38, al-Zarqawi dropped out of school at 17, family members have said. A thug in his teens, al-Zarqawi was known for heavy drinking and street fighting. In the 1980s, he was jailed for sexual assault, security officials have said without providing details.
He also had a passion for tattoos. In prison, Rababaa said al-Zarqawi covered up the tattoos, which he came to see as reminders of a shameful past. A prison doctor said he had at least one tattoo, a green anchor denoting his love of the sea, removed from his left arm.
Al-Zarqawi embraced religion when he was in his early 20s. Like many poor, frustrated young men, he was drawn to the calls of pride and identity made by radical preachers.
His late mother, Umm Sayel, said last year that her son hung out at mosques because he had so much free time, and soon was bringing clerics home to explain the Quran to him. Zarqa is an industrial city 17 miles from Jordan’s capital, Amman.
Back in Jordan, he led a plot to topple the kingdom’s pro-Western monarch, which he considered an “infidel,” according to military court documents. He was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to 15 years in jail, but was freed under a general amnesty when Jordan’s King Abdullah II ascended to the throne in 1999.
Skills honed at camps
Upon release, al-Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan and developed skills in making explosives and mixing poisons at al-Qaida camps, a Jordanian security official said on condition of anonymity.
While abroad, he allegedly helped map out a conspiracy to use bombs and poison gas to attack American and Israeli tourists in Jordan during the kingdom’s millennium celebrations. A military court convicted him and 21 other Arab militants of a terror conspiracy and sentenced him in absentia to 15 years in jail in 2002. He also has been convicted in absentia in Jordan in the 2002 assassination of U.S. aid official Laurence Foley in Amman.
Since 1999, Jordanian intelligence picked up al-Zarqawi’s trail in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Iraq – but couldn’t catch him, partly because of his mastery of disguises and false passports, the Jordanian security official said.
Influence questioned
Rababaa, his former prison mate, doesn’t underestimate al-Zarqawi’s capacity for violence, but questions whether he could have planned the wave of suicide bombings and other attacks in Iraq for which he has claimed responsibility and for which the Americans blame him.
Rababaa also questions the authenticity of audio and video clips with alleged al-Zarqawi statements and beheadings posted on the Internet, saying the man he knew was “left-handed, chubbier and taller and his voice is softer than the man said to be him.”
Another ex-convict, who said he befriended al-Zarqawi while serving a life sentence for antigovernment activities, said he had a hard time imagining the militant as guiding Iraq’s insurgency. The second ex-con spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of drawing police attention. At least four relatives, including al-Zarqawi’s two nephews and his brother-in-law, have been detained in Jordan, some for simply talking to journalists.
The second ex-con said al-Zarqawi was feared by other inmates and, while loyal to his friends, was quick to fight if crossed, but lacked the brains and skills of a planner.
Jean-Charles Brisard, a French private investigator who has researched al-Zarqawi’s life, dismissed such skepticism.
“You can’t compare him to Osama bin Laden, who has an elaborate planning strategy, but al-Zarqawi has his own tactics, whose pillars are violence, chaos and destruction, like what we’re seeing in Iraq,” Brisard said from Switzerland.
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