As the Afghan factions began fighting one another, Ahmad returned to Jordan in 1992. He quickly joined up with a militant group led by Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, a rising jihadist ideologue. But after guns and bombs were found hidden in the walls of his house, purportedly for use against Israel, Ahmad was, along with Maqdisi, shipped off to Suwaqah prison in 1994.
It seems the next five years, which he spent in Jordanian prisons, molded him into the Zarqawi we would later face on the battlefield. Behind bars, he became right-hand man to Maqdisi, who led the fundamentalist faction of prisoners. Under Maqdisi’s wing but in his shadow, Zarqawi became more pious. He memorized the Koran and tried to scrub his skin of tattoos using hydrochloric acid. He also began to lead. He organized prisoners in his cellblock for protests and first practiced violent bullying as a way to keep people in line. He took to lifting homemade weights, building the physical bulk visible later on the grainy videos from Iraq. His brash resistance to the authorities won him the right to wear what he wanted—Afghan robes—and the respect of his followers. As Ahmad became harder, Maqdisi relinquished leadership of the organization to him. By the end of his prison time, Ahmad could, according to a prison doctor, “order his followers to do things just by moving his eyes.”
Released in March 1999 after the new king of Jordan, Abdullah II, granted a blanket amnesty, Ahmad soon traveled back to Peshawar with his Jordanian wife in tow, then to Afghanistan, where he established his own training camp in Herat in 2000. There he married a second wife and adopted the name Abu Musab, a kunya meaning the father of Musab, from Zarqa. Zarqawi’s Jordanian credentials and connections brought recruits from the Levant, an underrepresented group in Al Qaeda. He maintained a working but informal relationship with bin Laden’s organization, largely mediated by Saif al-Adl, Al Qaeda’s deputy military chief.
During the invasion to oust the Taliban the following year, Zarqawi escaped the bombing with only a set of broken ribs. With a small band of jihadists, he fled to Iran, and he was then dispatched to lead a contingent of fighters to Iraq. Just before leaving, he visited and said good-bye to Saif al-Adl. Revenge, al-Adl recalled, was on Zarqawi’s mind.
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Shortly after the June 29 meeting in the White House, we started following a promising lead to Zarqawi: Mohammad Rabih, also known as Abu Zar. Abu Zar was believed to be a top leader in Al Qaeda in Iraq and was a connection between the network’s component pieces. Al Qaeda in Iraq comprised localized networks—in Baghdad, in the Fallujah-to-Ramadi corridor, in the western Euphrates, and in Mosul—that used and contested specific areas of terrain through traditional terrorist-insurgent attacks. Overlaying the geographic infrastructure, Zarqawi developed capacity-based networks that specialized in particular functions—foreign fighters, car bombing, and propaganda, among others. Networks rose and fell based on the acuity and energy of their leaders. As a native Iraqi and a key facilitator of the car-bombing operations, Abu Zar was connected to each of the geographic networks—making him a possible line to Zarqawi himself.
After trying to track Abu Zar down for more than a month, we received surprising news. He was about to be buried in Abu Ghraib city although we had not heard of his death. Skeptical, we decided to “attend” his funeral. It wouldn’t be the first time a target tried to fake his own funeral or spread rumors of his death. With sources watching from the ground, we circled aerial surveillance above, recording the funeral, which I later watched. While we often watched funerals, we never bombed or raided one. In most cases it was a moot point—there were too many civilians present. But even when the attendees were likely only militants, we didn’t. It was important as a force to set limits. So on that hot afternoon, we watched.
On the recording, men shuffled into neat rows in front of an inelegant plywood coffin, unadorned except for Arabic script painted along the sides. An imam, with a longer beard and headdress, led the men, most in Western-style clothes, through prayers. The rows raised and lowered and then folded their hands in unison, then repeated the gestures. Although we could not distinguish the details on the ground, these funerals typically had a group of women who rocked in ritual mourning. On this day we heard that one was Abu Zar’s mother, her body contorted in pain. The words of the imam and wails of the women weren’t captured on the aerial surveillance recording, but our sources on the ground believed they were genuine.