The life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq and a terrorist with a stature second only to Osama bin Laden, ended last night in the rubble of a safe house north of Baquba in Iraq.

The village of Hibhib where he died, betrayed by a tip-off during a meeting with other insurgent leaders, lies less than 500 miles from his birthplace, Zarqa, the tough Jordanian city he took as his name.

But for the last sixteen years of his life, with the exception of a spell in a Jordanian prison in the 1990s, he had been on the move, criss-crossing the Middle East, leaving wives at home and in Afghanistan, before launching the three-year campaign of singular, unparalleled violence that made him the most feared militant in Iraq.

Al-Zarqawi was born Ahmad Faadhil al-Khalailah on October 30, 1966, and grew up in a large poor family in Zarqa, north of Amman. He spent his childhood, according to his biographer, Jean-Charles Brisard, as a dreamy child, uninterested in school, spending his spare time in a large, sunbaked cemetery next to his house.

By the time he reached his late teens, he was turning into a street tough, fond of violence and drinking, and, at 17, was expelled from school.

Through the Khalailah clan, he found work in lowly municipal jobs but according to interviews with his neighbours, was inattentive and often in trouble. In the mid-1980s he was arrested for a succession of shoplifting and minor drug offences. Nicknamed "the green man" for his patchwork of tattoos, forbidden by Islam, he attacked a man with a knife and was questioned for rape.

Desperate to reform their son, al-Zarqawi's parents put him under the tutelage of a local sheikh and preacher of fundamental Salafist Islam. Not a natural theologian, al-Zarqawi is said to have been more inspired by the stories of jihad from Afghanistan and the fight against the Soviet army than by the tenets of faith, and in 1989 arrived in Peshawar, on the Pakistani border, to join the Mujahidin.

But he missed the fighting and instead, according to The New York Times, occupied himself writing for a small jihadi newsletter and immersing himself in the stories and practices of guerrilla warfare.

By the time he returned to Jordan in 1991, al-Zarqawi was a decided zealot, committed to war against the USSR and what he saw as the corrupt Hashemite regime in his homeland. He also conceived an enmity for the US but again his intentions to turn his hatred into violence were undone, when in 1993 Jordanian police found a stash of guns and bombs in his house.

Sentenced to 15 years in jail and labelled a terrorist ever after, al-Zarqawi sought to study Islam. But it was his ferocity, his willingness to fight despite his unimpressive size, that made him a leader of inmates and when he was released under an amnesty in 1999, he swiftly made his way back to Afghanistan to learn more of violence.

After swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden and the Taleban, al-Zarqawi distinguished himself by setting up a jihadi training camp in Herat, on the border with Iran, in 2000. Following the model of bin Laden and his loose coalition of militants, al-Zarqawi named his group Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Jihad), the name he later gave to his Iraqi organisation, and incorporated Jordanians alongside fighters from across the Middle East.

Failed plots to send bombers to Israel, Turkey and Jordan were superceded by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. Wounded in an airstrike, al-Zarqawi fled to northern Iraq via Iran where he formed an alliance between the militant group, Ansar-al-Islam, and al-Qaeda.

From late 2002, al-Zarqawi emerged as the most dangerous al-Qaeda export to Iraq. In October, he ordered the assassination of Laurence Foley, an American diplomat, in Amman. In February 2003 he was described to the UN by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, as an "al-Qaeda lieutenant" and poisons specialist, who was building a terrorist group with the approval of Saddam Hussein. Jordan sentenced him to death in absentia.

At the beginning of the war, al-Zarqawi is believed to have been driven out of the country, but by August 2003 he was back, orchestrating the bombings of the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, killing 14 people, and the destruction of the UN headquarters in the country, a spectacular act of terror which succeeded in driving the UN out of Iraq.

In the following six months, al-Zarqawi's force, only numbering a few hundred, but well funded and boosted by the presence of several former members of Saddam's army, carried out a series of breathtakingly violent sectarian attacks, targetting Shia pilgrims. In March 2004, he directed the most lethal synchronised atrocity of the insurgency, killing 171 Shia pilgrims with mortars and bombs in Baghdad and Karbala in March 2004.

But it was during the following month that Tawhid wal Jihad, by this point with a functioning media unit, made its definitive imprint on the war in Iraq, with first the kidnap and then the ritualised beheading of Nicholas Berg, a 26-year-old American businessman. Al-Zarqawi, wielding the sword, committed a murder broadcast around the world.

As the kidnappings and beheadings multiplied — al-Zarqawi himself is believed to have cut off the head of Kenneth Bigley, the British hostage, in October 2004 — the Bush Administration raised the bounty on his head to $25 million, the same offered for the capture of bin Laden.

But by the beginning of this year, after a series of narrow escapes from US airstrikes and one release from custody by Iraqi soldiers who failed to recognise him, al-Zarqawi's tactics appeared to have lost favour with others in the patchwork of the Iraqi insurgency and in March, rumours circulated that he had been sidelined in a new umbrella of militants.

The news of al-Zarqawi's death came with his exact day-to-day role in Iraq, as it has ever been, a little opaque. But the signature of his brutality has been written largely and unmistakeably across this war.

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