Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

Biography

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, born Ahmad Fadeel al-Khalayleh in 1966, grew up in a poor family in the Jordanian industrial town of Zarqa. He dropped out of school and became a petty criminal before turning to militant Islam.

He went to Afghanistan in 1989, as the Soviet withdrawal was under way, and worked for an Islamist newsletter in Peshawar, where he met the Salafi ideologue Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Arrested in Jordan in 1992 after weapons were found in his home, he spent seven years in prison, where he hardened his views and became a leader among inmates.

Released in a 1999 amnesty, he left for Afghanistan and, with money from Osama bin Laden, set up a training camp in Herat for his own group, Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. After the 2001 U.S. invasion he fled to Iran and later to northern Iraq. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq his network carried out bombings, kidnappings and beheadings against coalition forces, foreigners, Iraqi institutions and Shia civilians; he personally beheaded the American hostage Nicholas Berg in 2004.

In October 2004 he pledged allegiance to bin Laden, and his group became al-Qaeda in Iraq. It claimed the November 2005 hotel bombings in Amman, and in January 2006 he became head of the Mujahideen Shura Council. He was killed by a U.S. air strike on a safe house at Hibhib, near Baqubah, on 7 June 2006.