Kan dette være mannen som er den farligste mannen i Irak? Spørsmålet henger i luften etter å ha lest profilen i Nytimes. Det er ikke innlysende at dette er mannen som kan organisere terror på bred front. Men, sier kildene, han kan ha forandret seg.

Zarqawi var fra en fattig familie i en by nord for Jordan, med høy kriminalitet. Han var liten og ikke særlig kraftig, men var stadig i slåsskamp. Begynte å drikke allerede som 17-pring, fikk tatoveringer, alt sammen uislamsk. Det var typisk Zarqawi at han var ekstrem i alt han gjorde.

Det var vanskelig å få utløp for temperamentet og livsstilen i Jordan. Zarqawi dro til Afghanistan, men kom for sent til å delta i jihad. Han var 22 år og året var 1989. Russerne hadde dratt. Men i Afghanistan begynner radikaliseringen. Han skrev for et jihad-blad.

Vel hjemme havnet han i fengsel og det var rene utklekkingsanstalten for islamister. Unge menne ble plassert sammen med fanatiske imamer og sheiker.

Mr. Zarqawi was sent to Swaqa prison, on the desert’s edge. He was housed with other political prisoners in a large room with iron bunk beds. Cellmates said Mr. Zarqawi turned his bunk into a cave, covering each side with blankets. He sat for hours bent over a Koran, trying to memorize all 6,236 verses.

Friends said this was typical. When he was a drinker, they said, he was an extreme drinker. When he was violent, he was extremely violent.

He strutted around in Afghan dress and a woolly Afghan hat and lived and breathed old Afghan battles. «Back then, he liked Americans,» Mr. Abu Doma said. «Abu Musab used to say they were Christian and they were believers.»

As the years passed, Mr. Zarqawi’s arms and chest grew – and so did his role. He mapped out shifts for cleaning, bringing meals to cells and visiting the doctor. He did not talk much. When asked to describe him during this period, almost everyone interviewed began with the word «jad,» which means serious.

His firmness was his attraction, fellow inmates said, his remoteness his power. By 1998, when a prison doctor, Basil Abu Sabha, met him, Mr. Zarqawi was clearly in charge.

«He could order his followers to do things just by moving his eyes,» Dr. Abu Sabha said.

His religious views became increasingly severe. They had been marinating in a stew of militant beliefs served up by the imams and sheiks in the iron bunks next to him. He lashed out at cellmates if they read anything but the Koran.

Mr. Abu Doma said he got a threatening note for reading «Crime and Punishment.»

«He spelled Dostoyevsky ‘Doseefski,’ Mr. Abu Doma said, laughing. «The note was full of bad Arabic, like a child wrote it.»

Zarqawi har visst svært begrensede intellektuelle evner. Det er derfor flere som trekker i tvil at det er han som er forfatter av brevet som amerikanerne offentliggjorde i februar, som inneholder en analyse av situasjonen i Irak. De tror ikke Zarqawi kan ha trukket sammenligninger med herskere i det 7. århundre. Men utelukker ikke at han kan ha fått hjelp.

Intelligence officials say he then left Afghanistan, where he had taken a second wife, and made his way to a corner of northern Iraq controlled by a Kurdish separatist Islamic group called Ansar al-Islam.

The next sighting of Mr. Zarqawi was on Sept. 9, 2002, when Jordanian agents said he illegally entered Jordan from Syria.

A month later Laurence Foley, a senior American diplomat, was fatally shot outside his home in Amman. Jordanian agents arrested three men who, the agents said, told them that they had been recruited, armed and paid by Mr. Zarqawi. He was sentenced to death in absentia.

At the beginning of the war in Iraq, Mr. Zarqawi and the Ansar fighters were driven out of the country. In August a car bomb blew up the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the first in a deadly wave of bombings. Mr. Zarqawi, because of his history as an anti-Jordan militant, was immediately a suspect.

Hvis dette stemmer er det høyst sannsynlig at mullah Krekar kjenner Zaqawi. Det påstås at al-Ansar har vært aktiv i selvmordsaksjonene. Uansette r det interessant at den jordanske ambassaden var det første målet, som innledet terrorkampanjen i Irak

A PROFILE IN TERROR
Zarqawi’s Journey: From Dropout to Prisoner to Insurgent Leader
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Published: July 13, 2004