FROM his beginning as a hyperactive child and school bully in a rough and dusty Jordanian town to the height of his infamy as the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi knew little apart from violence. He seems to have felt whole only when locked in conflict with others. He was seen by most of his associates as a dim-witted brute, yet he was able to inspire his followers to sacrifice their lives for his murderous cause.

Perhaps second only to the overall al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, he helped to deepen suspicion of the Islamic faith in the outside world. By contrast, he gained countless admirers among Sunni Muslims, the majority sect of Islam. These included the influential and the rich. When he personally beheaded the British engineer Kenneth Bigley in October 2004 in the Iraqi town of Falluja, and posted a video of the savagery on the internet, a newspaper columnist in Egypt wrote: “We all secretly love Abu Musab”. Saudi millionaires sent him donations and throughout the Islamic world troubled young men dreamt of joining his band. For tactical reasons, he co-operated with remnants of Saddam Hussein’s deposed Baathist regime while, at the same time, he was implicated in other terrorist plots from Jordan to Spain.

He was born Ahmad Faadhil al-Khalailah in about 1966 in the small, industrial town of Zarqa, north of Amman, the Jordanian capital. He had seven sisters and two brothers and his father, a traditional faith healer, often found it difficult to feed and clothe his brood. His mother suffered from leukaemia. His clan of the Bani Hasan were originally Beduin in the Jordanian desert, not Palestinians as sometimes claimed. The circumstances of his upbringing could hardly differ more drastically from those of the pampered and wealthy Osama bin Laden in Saudi Arabia.

Ahmad al-Khalailah’s childhood was characterised by fighting constantly with other boys and he left school at about 16 without obtaining a certificate of secondary education. There followed a series of short-term menial jobs and petty crimes that allowed him to drink heavily and aspire to a life in the West. According to official records in Jordan, he spent some time in prison “for sexual offences”.

In 1989, however, he headed for Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation there alongside other Muslim foreigners, including many Arab Mujahidin “holy warriors”. But the Soviet forces had already withdrawn and what he found was not to his liking. While officially trying to bring down the Communist regime of President Najibullah, the Mujahidin spent more time fighting among themselves and robbing civilians. Al-Khalailah found a job as a reporter for an Islamist newspaper, Al-Bonyaan al Masous (Firm Foundation), his speciality being the glories that Arab fighters had achieved fighting the atheistic Soviet Army.

By his own account, it was in Afghanistan that he had a life-changing vision. He would describe how, while trying to fall asleep one night in a cave, he saw a great sword falling from the sky. On its blade was written the word jihad.

In 1992 al-Khalailah returned to Zarqa and, a year later, was arrested for hiding rifles and bomb-making equipment in his home. He told his interrogators that he had found them. He was sentenced to seven years in the harsh Swaqa jail on the edge of the desert, where, with his fists, he soon established himself as the leader of his block. He also attempted to memorise the Koran to increase his religious standing, and encouraged his minions to describe him as “the Afghan”, meaning that he had fought in the Afghan jihad. He donned Afghan costume and wore an Afghan felt hat.

In March 1999 al-Khalailah was released under a general amnesty declared by King Hussein. His next plans were unclear; on the one hand, perhaps inspired by al-Qaeda which had attacked several American targets in Africa and elsewhere, he advocated a Muslim holy war against the US, but on the other, he talked of buying a lorry and opening a grocery shop.

In early 2000 he left his wife and two children in Jordan and took his ailing mother to Peshawar in Pakistan where, he said, the mountain air might cure her. Soon, however, the Jordanian Government issued a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of complicity in a plot to attack Christian pilgrims during the Millennium celebrations. Al-Khalailah sent his mother home and, in June, crossed the border into the Taleban-run Afghanistan where al-Qaeda had its base. His mother would die in Jordan in February 2004, her last wish being that her son should die in battle rather than in prison.

It was during this second stay in Afghanistan that al-Khalailah assumed his nom de guerre of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, “the Imposer from Zarqa”. American Intelligence believes that, for a time, he was put in charge of an isolated al-Qaeda arms store, but, beside his taking a second wife, little has come to light of his activities at this time. He did not stand out.

When, in late 2001, an American-led coalition overthrew the Taleban Government and decimated the leadership of al-Qaeda, al-Zarqawi was wounded in one leg. He fled across Iran to Iraq and reportedly received treatment in Baghdad, apparently at the expense of the Iraqi Government. It is believed that Saddam refused a request by King Hussein to extradite al-Zarqawi to Jordan, despite the close relationship between the two countries at the time. In any case, al-Zarqawi is understood to have visited Syria, Lebanon and Jordan before basing himself in the summer of 2002 in a strip of territory in the Iraqi Kurdish region on the border with Iran that was held by the group Ansar al-Islam (the Supporters of Islam).

In the late spring of 2003, soon after the fall of Iraq to the Anglo-American coalition, the Ansar enclave was overrun by Kurdish troops helped by American aircraft, but by then al-Zarqawi had fled to the Sunni Triangle in northwestern Iraq. There, he reorganised his followers and gave them a new name, Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War), the first word being an indirect attack on the Christian concept of the Trinity.

Tolerated, and possibly funded and equipped, by remnants of the security forces of the deposed regime, based in the Sunni town of Falluja to the west of Baghdad, al-Zarqawi’s group sent a regular stream of suicide bombers to harass American troops and all who co-operated with them. These included the religious leadership of the majority Shias, the Jordanian Embassy, recruits to the new Iraqi police and army, and the two main political parties of the Kurds.

Two bombings in August 2003 destroyed the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad and attacked a procession of Shia pilgrims. In the first, one of the UN’s most senior officials, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was among the 22 dead. In the second, near the most revered Shia shrine in the city of Najaf, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Hakim and 82 clerics and pilgrims died. These atrocities were followed by a string of others, such as the destruction of the headquarters of both the Kurdish parties in the city of Arbil in February 2004 in which 117 people, many of them political leaders, died.

With large numbers of Iraqis now volunteering for jobs in the new army and police, such massive attacks became more difficult for the al-Zarqawi group. As a result, it appeared to switch tactics. Foreign technicians and contractors were abducted and beheaded on film for broadcasting on Arab satellite channels. Consequently, many who had come to Iraq to rebuild the country’s infrastructure left or retired behind elaborate and expensive security cordons. By the summer of 2004, when the cost of employing guards for the 15-mile taxi ride to Baghdad airport was estimated at £183 a mile, billions of dollars designated by the United States for reconstruction had to be spent on providing security for personnel. Reconstruction had been almost halted.

Being a Salafi, or purist Sunni Muslim, al-Zarqawi particularly hated Shias as heretics and appeared intent on creating a civil war between them and the minority Sunnis in Iraq, so as to mobilise Arabs outside the country in support of the Sunnis. This was laid out in a captured letter in February 2004 which he had reportedly tried to send to bin Laden.

When Fallujah eventually fell to American and Iraqi government troops in November 2004, al-Zarqawi appeared to have fled elsewhere. But some of his most important underlings died or were arrested.

At times, so much activity was being attributed to al-Zarqawi in so many places that it was difficult to believe his accusers. For example, while he seemed firmly stationed in Iraq, Spanish and Moroccan authorities implicated him in the murder of 191 people in the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 and, in October that year, the Jordanian Government charged him as the ringleader of a plot to use chemical weapons and explosives to attack several targets in Amman. Some of those captured in connection with the Jordanian plot confessed to being followers of al-Zarqawi and it was claimed that, had the plot succeeded, thousands of people would have died.

Towards the middle of 2004, al-Zarqawi changed the name of his organisation to “al-Qaeda in Iraq”, perhaps in the hope of increasing the funding he received from wealthy Arabs abroad and attracting more recruits for suicide missions. In November last year al-Zarqawi extended operations outside Iraq. He sent 4 suicide bombers to blow up three hotels in Amman, killing 57 people, including guests at a wedding reception. The widespread spontaneous protests that followed embarrassed the “jihadis”, and may have contributed to an announcement this year that al-Qaeda in Iraq was now under an Iraqi commander.

If, as is reported, al-Zarqawi had come to dream of one day overshadowing his mentor and ostensible leader, bin Laden, while the latter still lived, he may to an extent be said to have succeeded. In 2002, in Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi had been snubbed by the al-Qaeda chief, who had refused to admit him to the central council of his organisation. Now, isolated and largely impotent in their hideouts in the hinterland of tribal Pakistan after the removal of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan, bin Laden and what remained of the core leadership of al-Qaeda were reduced to issuing public appeals to al-Zarqawi to concentrate his attacks on the Americans and their allies in Iraq, not on the civilian population of that country. By contrast, al-Zarqawi was able to attack targets in the heart of Baghdad with impunity and flaunt his bloody successes on Arab satellite television channels. The Americans had put an equal price, $25 million, on the heads of the two men.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was born in 1966. He was killed on June 7, 2006, aged about 40.