The Apostle Of Hate

By Bobby Ghosh

Abu Mousab Al-Zarqawi didn't have to be in a room to silence it. Dozens of times in the past three years, I have sat with insurgent leaders, listening to their bombastic pronouncements and boastful tales of "victorious battles" against U.S. forces, complete with verbal sound effects of gunfire and explosions. On such occasions, there was only one sure way to quiet them down: ask about al-Zarqawi. Suddenly, they would begin talking in hushed tones, almost whispers--as if saying his name out loud might conjure him like a malevolent spirit.

Many of those men had worked with al-Zarqawi, plotted with him, fought alongside him. But they remained in awe of him, citing his capacity to take any situation and bend it to his will. "Three years ago, Abu Mousab was asking us for advice on how to start a jihad in Iraq," said an insurgent commander who had first met al-Zarqawi in Fallujah in the weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "But in a few months, we were, one way or another, fighting the jihad by his rules."

By the time he died, al-Zarqawi had not only rewritten the history of the insurgency in Iraq but also bequeathed to the world a deadly new type of terrorist. While Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri issued impotent threats from their hideouts, al-Zarqawi got his hands bloody in Iraq, turning it into the holy war's primary battlefield. He became the jihad's eminent fighter-superstar, embracing and embellishing his infamy with brazen declarations and brutal atrocities--he personally decapitated American Nicholas Berg on videotape, sent scores of suicide bombers to their doom, killed fellow Muslims and attacked their houses of worship. He extended his reach beyond Iraq, dispatching suicide bombers to attack hotels in his native Jordan last November, killing 60.

It was not just his insistence on remaining on the front lines of the battle that set him apart from his al-Qaeda elders. As the insurgency unfolded, al-Zarqawi articulated and then acted upon an ideology more forbidding and toxic than even bin Laden may have imagined. In branding Shi'ites as betrayers of the faith and calling for their liquidation, al-Zarqawi stoked a war within Islam itself--one that is being played out in the streets of Iraq every day, with Iraqis engaging in the kind of sectarian frenzy that al-Zarqawi had advocated all along.

Few could have predicted he would play such a pivotal role. He spent his youth as a street thug in the dusty town of Zarqa before finding his life's purpose in the terrorist camps of Afghanistan. After returning to Jordan he was arrested for possessing explosives and spent five years in prison, where he memorized the Koran and drafted cellmates to join his quest to overthrow Jordan's secular rulers. "Either you were with them or you were an enemy," a former prison mate told TIME in 2004. "There was no gray area." Al-Zarqawi drifted back to Afghanistan and passed through Iran and northern Iraq before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. In the chaotic days after the fall of Saddam, al-Zarqawi began to build a terrorist network by luring foreign jihadis to Iraq. He pulled off his first two spectacular attacks with the August 2003 bombings of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf.

Although the Bush Administration at times overstated al-Zarqawi's indispensability to a predominantly homegrown insurgency, al-Zarqawi himself was a master of self-promotion. The high school dropout learned to use the Internet to burnish his image, recruit fighters and propagate his dream of perpetual jihad against infidels everywhere. It was his name that filled collection boxes in extremist mosques across the Islamic world. The National Counterterrorism Center believes that militants linked to al-Zarqawi may be operating in as many as 40 countries. In Iraq his dark charisma turned him into a figure of myth and legend. A top commander of al-Nasser Salaheddin, an insurgent group, told TIME last month, "When children in Fallujah and Ramadi play war games, some will be mujahedin, others will be Americans, but the role everybody wants to play is Abu Mousab. The biggest, toughest boy will get that role."

Al-Zarqawi merged his jihadi group under the umbrella of al-Qaeda and pledged fealty to bin Laden. But there was reason to believe the relationship was strained. Al-Zarqawi's jihad was more rigidly uncompromising than bin Laden's: it wasn't enough to kill Westerners, it was just as important to slaughter fellow Arabs who followed a different form of Islam. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had been suspicious of Shi'ites but learned to work with them. In al-Zarqawi's eyes, Iraq's Shi'ites were apostates because their practice of Islam differs from the extreme Wahhabist version he embraced. For that, they deserved even more gruesome punishment than nonbelievers. Fighters from his inner circle told TIME he lost his cool only when discussing Shi'ites. "He really hates [them], even more than the Americans," says a mid-ranking al-Qaeda operative. Although al-Zarqawi taunted and harangued the U.S. in videos and statements posted on the Internet, in recent months it was the sectarian war that consumed most of his energy. He launched scores of attacks against Shi'ites and their religious sites, culminating in the Feb. 22 bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra.

The campaign has shattered the centuries-old sectarian balance in Iraq and set Shi'ites and Sunnis at one another's throats. The ensuing civil war may be al-Zarqawi's most poisonous legacy. In his last known communique, an audiotape released just days before he was killed, he exhorted Sunnis to "get rid of the infidel snakes ... and don't listen to those advocating an end to sectarianism and calling for national unity."

He was just as unforgiving of fellow Sunnis who refused to subscribe to his extreme vision, sending his suicide bombers to kill those who tried to join the peaceful political process. His unbending will caused splits in the Iraqi insurgency, as nationalist fighters and al-Zarqawi's jihadis fought armed skirmishes with one another. But, eventually, even those who disagreed with his methods conceded they were better off with him on their side than fighting against him: they needed the money, the materials, the men and the legitimacy that the fighter-superstar brought to the table.

In the final months of his life, al-Zarqawi sought a different kind of legitimacy. In exclusive interviews with TIME, fighters from his inner circle said that al-Zarqawi wanted to be seen, like bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, as a religious authority as well as a military commander. He may also have been trying to project a more moderate image, mindful of the revulsion induced by his barbarism toward fellow Muslims. One jihadist contact says al-Zarqawi had a growing sense that he couldn't trust those around him. He took to mimicking the habits of the Prophet Muhammad recorded in Muslim texts, including the way he brushed his teeth and wore his sandals. Lacking formal religious training, he prayed incessantly and consulted frequently with religious advisers--attempts, perhaps, to shed his murderous past and reinvent himself as a savior of Islam. But he never got the chance. U.S. forces bore in on al-Zarqawi by tracking his spiritual adviser Sheik Abdul-Rahman, a man the terrorist may have hoped would help guide him toward a new life. The U.S., and death, found him instead.