When he was picked for a secret mission one evening in early 2005, Ahmed Bakr felt no fear. He had been on many life-threatening assignments for al-Qaeda in Iraq. In comparison, taking a small package of high explosives to a village on the outskirts of Baghdad was almost an insult. "I thought, Why are they sending a fighter for such a simple job?" he says. But when he arrived at the given address, he began to sense that the mission might not be so petty after all. The modest house was guarded by fighters, one of whom recognized Bakr and waved him in. As he sat on a rug on the floor of the living room, he told himself this was clearly the hideout of an important figure. Then a man walked in from another room, greeting him in a quiet voice. It was Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq.
Bakr, a veteran of dozens of battles against U.S. troops, says he was instantly awestruck. "I could not feel my tongue, my hands, my legs ... I could not move," he says, his eyes widening at the very memory. "For a few moments I could not even think. My mind went completely blank." Bakr says al-Zarqawi led him into another room, with prayer mats and copies of the Koran. "Come, let us pray," al-Zarqawi said. Bakr says they prayed for about three hours, with al-Zarqawi reciting from memory several long surahs, or chapters from the Koran, in a whisper. From time to time, he broke into sobs and moans, babbling incoherently, as if in a trance. Afterward, Bakr was asked to join al-Zarqawi and some of his closest aides in a discussion on the life of the Prophet Muhammad that went on until dawn. It wasn't until morning that al-Zarqawi gave Bakr a message to take back to his field commander. It was an order to launch a suicide-bombing operation.
Bakr spoke about his first meeting--and many others over several months--with al-Zarqawi in a recent interview with TIME in Baghdad. He admitted he was using a pseudonym and asked that some details of his experiences be omitted in order to avoid al-Zarqawi's wrath. The anecdotes and other details in his account were verified by several sources, including a second al-Qaeda fighter who has spent some time close to al-Zarqawi, commanders of two Iraqi insurgent groups who have met the Jordanian-born terrorist, U.S. counterterrorism officials-- who confirmed some aspects and cast doubt on others--and others who have tracked his career closely. Their accounts provide a rare and intimate portrait of a fugitive who, despite being the most feared man in Iraq, has also remained the most obscure. After three years in which al-Zarqawi has helped turn Iraq into a terrorist breeding ground and claimed responsibility for the deaths of hundreds, new images of his visage emerged last week for the first time in years when he appeared in a video released on the Internet. The video's release coincided with the naming of Nouri al-Maliki as Iraq's new Prime Minister, who the U.S. hopes can finally form a unity government that will begin to erode the strength of the insurgency. In the video, a bearded and black-clad al-Zarqawi fires a machine gun to show off his prowess as a fighter, then aims some verbal broadsides at the enemy. He accuses the U.S. of waging a crusade against Islam, adding, "By God, your dreams will be defeated by our blood and by our bodies."