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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Zarqawi's colorful past |
| 2005-06-06 |
| Private family photographs of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader, are to appear in the first biography in English of the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. The book includes pictures of Zarqawi with his Jordanian bedouin mother and father, both of whom are now dead. Other photographs show him shortly before his journey to become a fighter in Afghanistan and in prison in Jordan in the 1990s. Zarqawi's group in Iraq has been linked to numerous insurgent atrocities, including the beheading of Kenneth Bigley, an engineer from Liverpool. The biography, Zarqawi: The New Face of Terrorism, will be published by Polity later this month. It claims that Zarqawi, as part of an attempt to build a Europe-wide network of sympathisers, has developed close links with an Islamic cleric under house arrest in Britain. "With Osama bin Laden out of circulation or incapacitated, Zarqawi ... is probably the most important figure within the radical Islamists,"said Jean-Charles Brisard, the book's author and a French terrorism investigator. Brisard recounts how Zarqawi, now 37, was expelled from school. He worked in a paper plant and then as a maintenance worker before drifting into crime. According to the book: "Those who knew him in those years say that he drank like a fish and covered his body with tattoos, two practices condemned by Islam. They called him 'the green man' on account of his many tattoos." Zarqawi was later convicted for wounding with a knife. He was also arrested for shoplifting, drug dealing and a rape allegation. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 I have some interesting pictures of him too! I miss you, Sheiky! Take care of your purty mouth! |
| Posted by: Mahmoud Al-Jailbirdi 2005-06-06 15:12 |