During their years in a Jordanian prison, inmates remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in his Afghan dress weeping uncontrollably in the courtyard whenever he knelt to pray. "Abu Musab cried constantly. He was very emotional, almost like a child," said 35-year-old Yousef Rababaa as he recalled the young militant.
| "Abu! Quit that blubbering right now, or I'll give you something to blubber about!" |
Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born one-time street thug who is now the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is remembered as a gentleman obsessed with Islam's past glory.
"Gone! All gone!"
"Ohfergawsake! Mahmoud! Get him some more tissues!" |
 His intense loyalty, his former cellmates say, went hand in hand with a fanatical adherence to his religion. He dreamed of an Islamic utopia where people would relive the puritanical lifestyle of the faith's early founders.
| This reads like a PR Release, Zarqawi is pumping up his resume for head turban. |
The Arab Bedouin whose fanaticism condones the killing of fellow Muslims and is blamed by Washington for the beheading of foreign captives and suicide bombings that have maimed and killed hundreds, was a gentle almost stoic figure, his cellmates remember. They say his ability to mesmerise the closest people around him was another facet of a shadowy illusive character who has so far evaded capture.
| Yup, he's going for Binny's crown. |
| "It's his eyes! Don't look in his eyes, Mahmoud!... Damn! Too late!" |
Rababaa who left prison with Zarqawi after an amnesty in April 1999 recollects how Zarqawi stood out among his peers for his piety. "Abu Musab would be as preoccupied with writing letter after letter to his old mother as spending long hours reciting the Koran," said Rababaa.
| "He's a good boy, took care of dear old mum and read the Koran while field stripping an AK, blindfolded!" |
It was piety of an extreme nature that moulded Zarqawi's militancy, according to Islamlists and experts who follow many of the young adherents of the Salafi brand of Islamist jihadis. "Emotions for militants like Zarqawi shape much of their behaviour and mentality and drive them to wreak revenge for perceived injustices without thinking of the consequences," said Mohammed Najjar, a Jordanian scholar who follows radical Islamist political movements.
| "Really. He's just a big bundle of sentimentality!" |
Another cellmate, Khaled Abu Doma, 36, recalled the young Zarqawi's long days spent kneeling with another inmate on a mat in the prison courtyard as he patiently helped him memorise verse after verse from the Koran. Zarqawi would also wash other prisoner's clothes and scrub and clean prison lavatories, chores which other prisoners usually shunned, Abu Doma said.
| So, he was the prison bitch |
But Zarqawi's commitment to a purist brand of Islam put both Muslim and non-believers at odds with his ideology, said Laith Shubailat, an prominent Islamist dissident who spent years in prison for his opposition to Jordan's pro-western monarchy. Shubailat, an advocate of non-violence and a parliamentary democracy to limit the Jordanian monarchy's extensive powers, recalled that the young militant's view of the world made him reject moderates like him.
| "Piss off, you moderate! I'm booked up!" |
"Zarqawi may be more faithful to the tenets of Islam, but he and his followers have gone astray in their search for the truth," Shubailat said as he recollected a morning when Zarqawi invited him for breakfast. "I was an apostate for them. They have no grey. You have to be white completely. They put difficult conditions," said Shubailat, whose belief in reform from within the establishment made it impossible for him to find common ground with Zarqawi.
| "Lemme see, here. I want people to have individual rights, to vote, to have a say in how their government is run. You want to cut my head off. I'm sorry. I just don't see any common ground there. Good day to you, sir." |
Prison inmates and associates say Zarqawi found solace in an austere brand of Islam that gave him spiritual comfort from the social alienation he endured in a deprived upbringing. The childhood of Zarqawi, the son of an elder Bani Hassan tribesman, was shaped by poverty and the politics of the bleak industrial city of Zarqa, a melting pot of downtrodden Palestinian refugees and Bedouin tribes.
Influenced by radical mosque preachers whom he encountered in the city, Zarqawi then in his late teens left in early 1989 for Afghanistan where his fellow Islamists were then fighting the "great infidels" -- the Soviet army. Zarqawi was among the last of the thousands of Arab volunteers who went to wage jihad (holy war) in Afghanistan, the most prominent of whom was Saudi born militant Osama Bin Laden. The alienated Muslim zealot who returned to Jordan in 1992 found a country going through rapid social change and could not come to terms with Westernising influences.
| "Titties. Them women got titties. I just can't come to terms with that!" |
Within three years he had fallen foul of the establishment. He was arrested and charged for concealing explosives in a plot to destabilise the country. Zarqawi's four years in Jordanian prisons until his release in 1999 further distanced him from mainstream society but prepared him ideologically for his future endeavours, his prison comrades say. "Those prison years were critical in shaping Zarqawi's leadership qualities among his circle of followers that prepared him for his future role in Afghanistan and later Iraq," said Najjar. In September 1999 Zarqawi went back to Afghanistan before moving to Iraq where he is still thought to operate. |