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Abu Musab al-Zarqawi () (born October 20 , 1966 , Zarqa , Jordan ) is a Salafi Islamist Militant , a Guerrilla leader, and the rumoured leader of Al-Qaeda In Iraq . One or more individuals identifying themselves as Zarqawi have taken responsibility, on several audiotapes, for numerous acts of violence in Iraq , including the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages. He is also allegedly responsible for many other acts of violence, including the Beheading of hostages in Iraq. Due to his current role in the Iraqi Insurgency and his prior activities in Jordan , Zarqawi is wanted by American , Iraq i, and Jordan ian authorities. As an Islamist militant, Zarqawi opposes the presence of Suicide Bombers throughout Iraq, and especially to areas with large concentrations of Shia civilians. Zarqawi, believed to be a long time ally of Osama Bin Laden , is now a high-ranking member of bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, and since October 2004 has referred to his own organization Jama'at Al-Tawhid Wal-Jihad , or Monotheism and Holy War Group, an Insurgent network operating in Iraq, as "Al-Qaida in Iraq". On October 21 , 2004 , Zarqawi officially announced his allegiance to Al Qaida; on December 27 , 2004 , Al Jazeera broadcast an Audiotape of bin Laden calling Zarqawi "the prince of al Qaeda in Iraq" and asked "all our organization brethren to listen to him and obey him in his good deeds." {Link without Title} Zarqawi is the most wanted man in and Iraqi targets. The U.S. government is offering a USD $25 million reward for information leading to his capture, the same amount offered for the capture of bin Laden before March 2004. On 15 October 2004 , the U.S. State Department added Zarqawi and the Jama'at Al-Tawhid Wal Jihad group to its List Of Foreign Terrorist Organizations and ordered a freeze on any assets that the group might have in the United States. One Alias , Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh (), is believed to be his real name. The surname Zarqawi literally translates as "man from Zarqa". Zarqawi is a native of the Jordanian town of Zarqa , located 30 minutes northeast of the capital Amman . [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3483089.stm BACKGROUND The son of a native Jordanian family (al-Khalayleh of the Bani-Hassan tribe), Zarqawi grew up in the Jordanian town of Zarqa amidst Poverty and squalor. At the age of 17, he dropped out of school. According to vague Jordanian intelligence reports, Zarqawi was jailed briefly in the 1980s. Subsequently, he was active as a Militant in Afghanistan , Jordan, Iraq and elsewhere. In 1989, Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan to join the Insurgency against the Soviet Invasion , but the Soviet s were already leaving by the time he arrived. It is thought that he met and befriended Osama bin Laden while there. Instead, he became a Reporter for an Islamist newsletter. There are reports that in the mid-1990s, Zarqawi travelled to Europe and started the Al-Tawhid militant organization, a group dedicated to installing an Islamic regime in Jordan. Zarqawi was arrested in Jordan in 1992, and spent seven years in a Jordanian Prison for conspiring to overthrow the Monarchy to establish an Islamic Caliphate . In prison, Zarqawi reportedly became a feared leader among inmates according to some reports. According to others, he lacked the intelligence and charisma to lead any organization. Upon his release from prison in 1999, Zarqawi was involved in an attempt to blow up the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, Jordan where many Israeli and American tourists lodged. He fled Jordan and travelled to Peshawar , Pakistan , near the Afghanistan border. In Afghanistan, Zarqawi established a militant training camp near Herat . According to the Bush Administration , the training camp specialized in Poison s and explosives. Jordanian and European intelligence agencies claim that Zarqawi formed the group Jund al-Sham in 1999 with $200,000 of startup money from Osama Bin Laden . The group originally consisted of 150 members. It was infiltrated by members of Jordanian intelligence and scattered by Operation Enduring Freedom but in March 2005, a group of the same name claimed responsibility for a bombing in Doha , Qatar . {Link without Title} Sometime in 2001, Zarqawi was arrested in Jordan but was soon released. Later, he was convicted In Absentia and Sentenced To Death for plotting the attack on the Radisson SAS Hotel. {Link without Title} After the September 11 Attacks , Zarqawi again travelled to Afghanistan and was allegedly wounded in a U.S. bombardment. He moved to Iran to organize al-Tawhid, his former militant organization. Zarqawi supposedly traveled to Iraq to have his wounded leg treated at a hospital run by Uday Hussein . In the summer of 2002, Zarqawi was reported to have settled in northern Iraq, where he joined the Islamist Ansar Al-Islam group that fought against Kurdish- Nationalist forces in the region. {Link without Title} He reportedly became a leader in the group, although his leadership role has not been established. In Colin Powell 's notorious February 2003 speech to the United Nations urging war against Iraq, Zarqawi was cited as an example of Saddam Hussein 's support for terrorism. In his speech, Powell mistakenly referred to Zarqawi as a Palestinian but Powell and the Bush administration continued to stand by statements that Zarqawi linked Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. At the time, Zarqawi's group was a rival of bin Laden's. A CIA report in late 2004 concluded that it had no evidence Saddam's government was involved or aware of this medical treatment, and that "There’s no conclusive evidence the Saddam Hussein regime had harbored Zarqawi." One U.S. official summarized the report: "The evidence is that Saddam never gave Zarqawi anything."[http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1005-01.htm However, Jordan's King Abdullah stated in an interview that Jordan had detailed information of where in Iraq Zarqawi lived. Jordan attempted to have Zarqawi extradited, "But our demands that the former regime Saddam Hussein hand him over were in vain," King Abdullah said[http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2005/May/middleeast_May570.xml§ion=middleeast&col=]. According to MSNBC , The Pentagon had pushed to "take out" Zarqawi's operation at least three times prior to the Invasion Of Iraq , but had been vetoed by the National Security Council . The council's decision was made because they thought it would make it harder to convince other countries to join the US in a coalition against Iraq. "People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists," said former National Security Council member Roger Cressey. MILITANT ACTIVITIES Assassination of Laurence Foley Laurence Foley was a senior U.S. diplomat working for the U.S. Agency For International Development in Jordan. On October 28 , 2002 , he was Assassin ated outside his home in Amman . Under Interrogation by Jordanian authorities, three suspects confessed that they had been armed and paid by Zarqawi to perform the assassination. U.S. officials believe that the planning and execution of the Foley assassination was led by members of Afghan Jihad, the International Mujaheddin Movement, and Al-Qaida . One of the leaders, Salim Sa'd Salim Bin-Suwayd, was paid over USD$27,858 for his work in planning assassinations in Jordan against U.S., Israeli, and Jordanian government officials. Suwayd was arrested in Jordan for the murder of Foley. {Link without Title} Zarqawi was again sentenced ''in absentia'' in Jordan; this time, as before, his sentence was death. Nicholas Berg In May 2004, a ''.) Various middle east correspondents/experts including CNN 's Octavia Nasr have stated that the person talking on the Berg tape was not al-Zarqawi because he didn't speak with a Jordanian accent. Other incidents
Credibility questions Some people have purported that Zarqawi's notoriety is the product of U.S. war newspaper '' Daily Telegraph '' described the claim that Zarqawi was the head of the "terrorist network" in Iraq as a " Myth ". This report cited an unnamed U.S. military intelligence source to the effect that the Zarqawi leadership myth was initially caused by faulty intelligence, but was later accepted because it suited U.S. government political goals. {Link without Title} One Sunni insurgent leader claimed on 11 December that "Zarqawi is an American, Israeli and Iranian agent who is trying to keep our country unstable so that the Sunnis will keep facing occupation." {Link without Title} On 18 February 2006, Shiite cleric Muqtada As-Sadr voiced similar concerns: "I believe he is fictitious. He is a knife or a pistol in the hands of the occupier. I believe that all three - the occupation, the takfir the practice of declaring other Muslims to be heretics supporters, and the Saddam supporters - stem from the same source, because the takfir supporters and the Saddam supporters are a weapon in the hands of America. America pins its crimes on them."[http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD110006] On 10 April 2006, the '' Washington Post '' reported that the U.S. military has indeed been conducting a major propaganda offensive designed to exaggerate Zarqawi's role in the Iraqi insurgency. Gen. Mark Kimmitt says of the propaganda campaign that there "was no attempt to manipulate the press." In an internal briefing, Kimmitt is quoted as stating, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date." The main goal of the propaganda campaign seems to have been to exacerbate a rift between insurgent forces in Iraq, but intelligence experts worry that it has actually enhanced Zarqawi's influence. Col. Derek Harvey , "who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," warned an Army meeting in 2004 that "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways." While Pentagon spokespersons state unequivocally that PSYOPs may not be used to influence American citizens, there is little question that the information disseminated through the program has found its way into American media sources. The ''Post'' also notes that "One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war." {Link without Title} On April 25th 2006 a video appearing to show Zarqawi surfaced [24 ]. In the tape, the man says holy warriors are fighting on despite a three-year "crusade". US experts told the BBC they believed the recording was genuine. One part of the recording shows a man - who bears a strong resemblance to previous pictures of Zarqawi - sitting on the floor and addressing a group of masked men with an automatic rifle at his side. "Your mujahideen sons were able to confront the most ferocious of crusader campaigns on a Muslim state," the man says. Addressing US President George W Bush, he says: "Why don't you tell people that your soldiers are committing suicide, taking drugs and hallucination pills to help them sleep?" "By God," he says, "your dreams will be defeated by our blood and by our bodies. What is coming is even worse." The speaker in the video also reproaches the US for its "arrogance and insolence" in rejecting a truce offered by "our prince and leader", Osama Bin Laden. REPORTED MISSING LEG/DEATH Missing leg Claims of harm to Zarqawi have changed over time. Early in 2002, there were unverified reports from Afghan Northern Alliance members that Zarqawi had been killed by a missile attack in Afghanistan. Many news sources repeated the claim. Later, Kurdish groups claimed that Zarqawi had not died in the missile strike, but had been severely injured, and went to Baghdad in 2002 to have his leg amputated. On October 7 , 2002 , the day before Congress voted to give President Bush permission to invade Iraq, Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio that repeated this claim as fact. This was several of President Bush's primary examples of ways Saddam Hussein had aided, funded, and harbored al-Qaida. Powell repeated this claim in his infamous February 2003 speech to the UN, urging a resolution for war, and it soon became "common knowledge" that Zarqawi had a Prosthetic leg. In 2004, '' later reported that the leg amputation was something "officials now acknowledge was incorrect," though it's possible this was merely a restatement of the ''Newsweek'' report. {Link without Title} It is believed that a common CIA tactic is to portray an enemy as physically weak or incapacitated so as to reduce his popularity among the masses. When the video of the Berg beheading was released in 2004, credence was given to the claim that Zarqawi was alive and active. The man identified as Zarqawi in the video did not appear to have a prosthetic leg. Claims of death In March 2004, an insurgent group in Iraq issued a statement saying that Zarqawi had been killed in April 2003. The statement said that he was unable to escape the missile attack because of his prosthetic leg. His followers claimed he was killed in a US bombing raid in the north of Iraq The claim that Zarqawi had been killed in northern Iraq "at the beginning of the war," and that subsequent use of his name was a useful myth, was repeated in September 2005 by Sheikh Jawad Al-Khalessi, a Shiite Imam . [http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0,36-689730,0.html On May 24 2005 , it was reported on an Islamic website that a deputy would take command of Al-Qaeda while Zarqawi recovered from injuries sustained in an attack. Later that week the Iraqi government confirmed that Zarqawi had been wounded by U.S. forces, although the battalion did not realize it at the time. The extent of his injuries is not known, although some Radical Islamic websites called for prayers for his health. There are reports that a local hospital treated a man, suspected to be Zarqawi, with severe injuries. He was also said to have subsequently left Iraq for a neighbouring country, accompanied by two physicians. However, later that week the radical Islamic website retracted its report about his injuries and claimed that he was in fine health and was running the jihad operation. In an September 16 2005 article published by '' Le Monde '', Sheikh Jawad Al-Kalesi claimed that al-Zarqawi was killed in the Kurdish northern region of Iraq at the beginning of the US-led war on the country as he was meeting with members of the Ansar Al-Islam group affiliated to al-Qaida. Al-Kalesi also claimed "His family in Jordan even held a ceremony after his death." He also claimed that "Zarqawi has been used as a ploy by the United States, as an excuse to continue the occupation. saying that it was a pretext so they don't leave Iraq." {Link without Title} On samples to identify the dead. {Link without Title} However, none of those remains have reportedly belonged to him. REPORTEDLY CAPTURED AND RELEASED According to a CNN report dated December 15, 2005, {Link without Title} , al-Zarqawi was captured by Iraqi forces sometime during 2004 and later released because his captors did not realize who he was. U.S. officials called the report "plausible" but refused to confirm it. EXTERNAL LINKS
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