From street thug to icon of ‘holy war’

ABU Musab al-Zarqawi rose from the life of a street thug in Jordan to become the symbol of ‘holy war’ in Iraq, masterminding the bloodiest suicide bombings of the insurgency, beheading hostages and helping push Iraq into a spiral of sectarian violence with vicious attacks against Shi’ites.

The Jordanian-born 39-year-old was the most prominent of the insurgency’s leaders, but his strength within the movement was never certain.

Home-grown Sunni Iraqi guerrillas — who are believed to have tense relations with al-Zarqawi — are thought to have had an equal or even greater role in deadly attacks on US and Iraqi forces and Shi’ites.

However, he became the symbol of the jihadi — or ‘holy war’ — movement, nicknamed the ‘slaughtering sheikh’ by his supporters across the Arab world.

Al-Zarqawi is believed to have personally beheaded at least two American hostages, Nicholas Berg in April 2004 and Eugene Armstrong in September 2004.

Grisly videos of the slayings were posted on the internet.

Al-Zarqawi vowed fealty to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in October 2004 and had the same bounty on his head from the US military — $25 million — as bin Laden.

But he played a dramatically different role: While bin Laden was the hidden leader, issuing statements from hiding in Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi portrayed himself as a front-line warrior.

In the past year, al-Zarqawi moved his campaign beyond Iraq’s borders, carrying out a November 9, 2005, triple suicide bombing against hotels in Amman that killed 60 people, as well as other attacks in Jordan and even a rocket attack from Lebanon into northern Israel.

Born Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh on October 20, 1966, al-Zarqawi rose from a tough street life in the Jordanian industrial town of Zarqa — from which he eventually took his nom de guerre.

He was one of 10 siblings in a poor branch of the prominent Bani Hassan Bedouin tribe, which publicly renounced all ties to him.

In his teens, he was known as a thug, drinking alcohol and getting in street fights. He was jailed for six months for raping a girl, according to Jordanian security officials.

But he then embraced Islamic militancy, making his first trips to Afghanistan in the 1980s before returning to Jordan, where he was arrested in the mid-1990s.

It was in a Jordanian prison that he solidified his radical ideology.

After being released in an amnesty, al-Zarqawi went in 1999 to Afghanistan, where he formed links with bin Laden. He fled from Afghanistan during the US-led war that ousted the Taliban in late 2001.

In January, al-Zarqawi announced that his group was joining a larger umbrella group of Iraqi insurgents called the Shura Council of Mujahedeen, seen as an attempt to give an Iraqi face to his group, which was believed to be mainly made up of non-Iraqi, Arab fighters.