Face Of Terror

The killer lives in shadows, a phantom menace whose whereabouts are known only to a few trusted deputies. He exhorts followers to seek martyrdom in suicidal assaults against U.S. soldiers, Iraqi policemen and Christian churchgoers even as he remains perpetually on the run, seeming to abandon hideouts just as his pursuers arrive. Intelligence analysts say that before U.S. forces chased Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi out of the city of Fallujah, he would call lieutenants from a cell phone and then trash the SIM card after a single use to avoid giving himself away. So obscure is his identity, so ghostly his purported lifestyle, that even some who have joined al-Zarqawi’s campaign against U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies question whether his accomplishments are mostly myth. “We have not felt the existence of al-Zarqawi,” says insurgent leader Abu Lina, a top nationalist commander. “We haven’t known him or understood him.” But to a devoted few, his word is absolute. “Some just have to sit and listen to him,” a senior insurgent leader in Fallujah told TIME, “and they walk away committed.”

In the past year, that commitment has helped produce an almost daily horror show of suicide bombings, kidnappings, mass executions and televised beheadings. The atrocities have killed or maimed thousands, jeopardized next

month’s elections, dragged Iraq to the brink of civil conflict and drawn U.S. troops deeper into a war whose costs seem increasingly unbearable. Ascribing the mayhem in Iraq entirely to al-Zarqawi and his minions would overlook both U.S. miscalculations and the scope of the insurgency, which may command the support of as many as 20,000 Sunnis. But through his capacity for self-promotion and the sheer ruthlessness of his methods, al-Zarqawi, 38, has become the face of an insurgency fueled as much by religious zealotry as by nationalist resistance. He has catapulted himself from a fringe player on the global terrorist stage to its most potent operative, a villain judged by U.S. intelligence to be so dangerous that the bounty on his head now matches Osama bin Laden’s.

Al-Zarqawi’s aims seem clear: in messages intercepted by the U.S. military and in public statements posted on websites associated with his organization, formerly known as al-Tawhid and Jihad, al-Zarqawi has voiced his contempt for Iraq’s majority Shi’ites and his desire to provoke a civil war by slaughtering those perceived to be collaborating with the U.S. or the fledgling Iraqi authorities. In a July al-Tawhid document obtained by TIME, al-Zarqawi’s former deputy, Abu Anas al-Shami, refers to the group’s assassination of Ayatullah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, one of the most prominent Shi’ite leaders in Iraq, in an August 2003 bombing in Najaf. Al-Zarqawi has lured hundreds of zealots, foreign and homegrown, to join him by portraying Iraq as the new arena of global jihad, the proving ground for an epic war against the infidel. He pledged his allegiance to bin Laden in October in a Web announcement but has cultivated a global profile of his own, forging links with terrorist cells across Europe and the Middle East. An audiotape made in the summer and given to TIME records al-Shami saying the group’s goal is to turn Iraq into a fundamentalist state modeled on the Taliban’s rule, whose primeval strictures for Afghanistan al-Zarqawi has admired. (Al-Shami was killed in September in a U.S. bomb attack.)

Al-Zarqawi has shaped the Iraqi insurgency into the war he felt the Muslim world needed, elevating it from a ragtag nationalist movement into a holy war fought with the methods of the true believer. U.S. troops combing through ruins after their assault on Fallujah in November discovered evidence of the jihadists’ ghoulish designs: safe houses littered with bombmaking materials, bloodied knives and cages in which the group’s prisoners were held before they were executed.

While his notoriety grows with each atrocity, al-Zarqawi remains an enigma. Unlike bin Laden, he has never granted an interview to Western journalists or appeared in public. In the May videotape in which he personally carried out the beheading of American Nick Berg, al-Zarqawi’s face is hidden behind a black mask. “The stories about him are almost like he’s a ghost,” says a U.S. general in Iraq. Military commanders believe al-Zarqawi made Fallujah a base of operations, but associates say he and his aides fled long before the U.S. moved on the city. He may have relocated to Mosul or Baghdad, or slipped out of the country. The few who claim to have met him say al-Zarqawi projects an air of humility, casting himself as a reluctant leader thrust into the spotlight by events. On an al-Tawhid website, a man named Maysarra al-Gharib who belongs to the group’s religious council gives an account of a conversation with al-Zarqawi in which the leader spoke of his celebrity. “I am not a hero,” al-Gharib quotes al-Zarqawi as saying. “But I have to show up.”

Al-Zarqawi was not born into privilege. He grew up in Zarqa, Jordan, a bleak factory town that is home to several Palestinian refugee camps and the country’s major breweries. By some accounts, al-Zarqawi was a thug and boozer, a high school dropout who liked getting into scrapes. In the late 1980s, he joined a mosque that introduced him to Salafism, a stringent brand of Islam that exhorts followers to model their behavior after the life of the Prophet Mohammed. He soon headed to Afghanistan but arrived too late to taste combat in the jihad against the Soviets. “I wish I would have been killed in Khost in Afghanistan in 1990,” he told al-Gharib, according to the account posted on the website. “My heart was more tender and my soul was purer than now.”

In 1994, after returning to Jordan, al-Zarqawi was arrested for possessing explosives, which he purportedly intended to smuggle into the West Bank. In prison he devoted himself to memorizing the Koran and became the leader of his cellblock of 20 political prisoners. “They were all bearded, they all wore the same Afghan clothes and shared the same thinking,” says Youssef Rababa’a, 35, who spent three years in various Jordanian prisons with al-Zarqawi. “He stayed in the background, but the members of the group would do nothing without his approval.” Al-Zarqawi railed against Jordan’s secular rulers, plotting their overthrow. His gang recruited jailmates to join their struggle and denounced those who didn’t as un-Muslim. “Either you were with them or you were an enemy,” says Rababa’a. “There was no gray area.”

When al-Zarqawi was released in 1999, he returned to Afghanistan. There he is believed to have met bin Laden and set up an al-Qaeda–allied training camp in the western city of Herat. While bin Laden was willing to tolerate Muslims who didn’t share his extremism, al-Zarqawi viewed moderate Muslims as enemies of the faith. But he also proved to be a valuable asset for al-Qaeda, a tireless networker with a particular interest in attaining weapons of mass destruction. To al-Zarqawi, the U.S. invasion of Iraq presented the ideal conditions for waging jihad, as well as his chance to make up for missing the Afghan war in the 1980s. He spent the months leading up to the war moving through Iran and northern Iraq, where he attached himself to the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam. A confidential al-Tawhid document obtained by TIME describes a fighter killed in Fallujah last April as having joined al-Zarqawi in Baghdad “just before the fall of the previous regime”–a claim that backs up the Bush Administration’s disputed assertions that al-Zarqawi passed through the Iraqi capital while Saddam Hussein was in power.

Al-Zarqawi has built his network in Iraq by exploiting the furies unleashed by the fall of Saddam. Insurgents familiar with the inner workings of the al-Zarqawi network say he is less a military commander than a mafioso godfather, maintaining control over the flow of money from gulf states and Islamic charities and using it to influence the activities of the insurgent groups that make up his network. He imposes discipline through an unsparing code of loyalty: those whose devotion wavers are executed before they have the chance to desert. “There are only two ways to leave that organization,” says a midranking Iraqi insurgent leader. “You die in battle, or they kill you.” This insurgent says he considered merging his group’s operations with al-Tawhid, but reconsidered after meeting al-Zarqawi’s top aides. “It’s as though they’re from another planet,” he says. “You don’t know what they’re thinking one minute to the next.”

The excesses of the al-Zarqawi–led jihadists–in particular, their indiscriminate targeting of Shi’ite civilians–have alienated nationalist groups that condemn attacks on innocents. In recent statements, al-Zarqawi has expressed frustration at the failure of his supposed Sunni allies to stop the U.S. onslaught into Fallujah. In a letter to bin Laden intercepted by U.S. intelligence in January, al-Zarqawi writes that if he should fail in his effort to defeat democracy in Iraq, he and his followers will “pack our bags and search for another land, as is the sad, recurrent story in the arenas of jihad.” The sentiment is echoed in a tape of a “seminar” for jihadist recruits given to TIME, in which he refers repeatedly to Iraq’s place in a larger quest to restore Muslim pride. “It is shameful,” he says, “to see shame on us.”

With many of his closest lieutenants caught or killed, al-Zarqawi may be more vulnerable to capture. But some adherents of his destructive views will surely remain, willing to give their lives in the service of ripping Iraq apart–a goal they have already come close to achieving. In one motivational tape, al-Zarqawi is heard to say, “It is either dignity or the coffin.” The toxic legacy of al-Zarqawi’s deeds will persist long after he is gone. –Reported by Scott Macleod/Amman, Saad Hattar/Zarqa, Bruce Crumley/Paris and Timothy J. Burger and Elaine Shannon/Washington