War On Terror: The Apostle Of Hate

Abu Mousab Al-Zarqawi didn't have to be in a room to silence it. Dozens of times in the past three years, I have sat with insurgent leaders, listening to their bombastic pronouncements and boastful tales of "victorious battles" against U.S. forces, complete with verbal sound effects of gunfire and explosions. On such occasions, there was only one sure way to quiet them down: ask about al-Zarqawi. Suddenly, they would begin talking in hushed tones, almost whispers--as if saying his name out loud might conjure him like a malevolent spirit.

Many of those men had worked with al-Zarqawi, plotted with him, fought alongside him. But they remained in awe of him, citing his capacity to take any situation and bend it to his will. "Three years ago, Abu Mousab was asking us for advice on how to start a jihad in Iraq," said an insurgent commander who had first met al-Zarqawi in Fallujah in the weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "But in a few months, we were, one way or another, fighting the jihad by his rules."

By the time he died, al-Zarqawi had not only rewritten the history of the insurgency in Iraq but also bequeathed to the world a deadly new type of terrorist. While Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri issued impotent threats from their hideouts, al-Zarqawi got his hands bloody in Iraq, turning it into the holy war's primary battlefield. He became the jihad's eminent fighter-superstar, embracing and embellishing his infamy with brazen declarations and brutal atrocities--he personally decapitated American Nicholas Berg on videotape, sent scores of suicide bombers to their doom, killed fellow Muslims and attacked their houses of worship. He extended his reach beyond Iraq, dispatching suicide bombers to attack hotels in his native Jordan last November, killing 60.

It was not just his insistence on remaining on the front lines of the battle that set him apart from his al-Qaeda elders. As the insurgency unfolded, al-Zarqawi articulated and then acted upon an ideology more forbidding and toxic than even bin Laden may have imagined. In branding Shi'ites as betrayers of the faith and calling for their liquidation, al-Zarqawi stoked a war within Islam itself--one that is being played out in the streets of Iraq every day, with Iraqis engaging in the kind of sectarian frenzy that al-Zarqawi had advocated all along.

Few could have predicted he would play such a pivotal role. He spent his youth as a street thug in the dusty town of Zarqa before finding his life's purpose in the terrorist camps of Afghanistan. After returning to Jordan he was arrested for possessing explosives and spent five years in prison, where he memorized the Koran and drafted cellmates to join his quest to overthrow Jordan's secular rulers. "Either you were with them or you were an enemy," a former prison mate told TIME in 2004. "There was no gray area." Al-Zarqawi drifted back to Afghanistan and passed through Iran and northern Iraq before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. In the chaotic days after the fall of Saddam, al-Zarqawi began to build a terrorist network by luring foreign jihadis to Iraq. He pulled off his first two spectacular attacks with the August 2003 bombings of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf.