Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (, , Father of Musab, from Zarqa; ; October 30, 1966 – June 7, 2006), born Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh (, ), was a Jordanian jihadist who ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. He became known after going to Iraq and being responsible for a series of bombings, beheadings, and attacks during the Iraq War, reportedly "turning an insurgency against US troops" in Iraq "into a Shia–Sunni civil war". He was sometimes known by his supporters as the "Sheikh of the slaughterers".
He formed Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad in 1999, and led it until his death in June 2006. Zarqawi took responsibility, on several audio and video recordings, for numerous acts of violence in Iraq including suicide bombings and hostage executions. Zarqawi opposed the presence of U.S. and Western military forces in the Islamic world, as well as the West's support for the existence of Israel. In late 2004 he joined al-Qaeda, and pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. After this al-Tawhid wal-Jihad became known as Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and al-Zarqawi was given the al-Qaeda title "Emir of Al Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers".
In September 2005, he declared "all-out war" on Shi'ites in Iraq, after the Iraqi government offensive on insurgents in the Sunni town of Tal Afar. He dispatched numerous suicide bombers throughout Iraq to attack American soldiers and areas with large concentrations of Shia militias. He is also thought to be responsible for the 2005 bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Zarqawi was killed in a targeted killing by a joint U.S. force on June 7, 2006, while attending a meeting in an isolated safehouse in Hibhib, a small village approximately west-northwest of Baqubah. One United States Air Force F-16C jet dropped two 500-pound (230 kg) guided bombs on the safehouse.
Personal life
Early life
Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh ( ), is believed to have been al-Zarqawi's real name. "Abu Musab" literally translates to "Musab's father", born in the name Ahmed al-Khalayleh to an impoverished Jordanian family in 1966. Raised in Zarqa, an industrial town located 27 kilometers (17 mi) north of Amman, with seven sisters and two brothers, and of Bedouin background, his father has been described as either a retired army officer or a practitioner of traditional medicine whose death precipitated the economic distress of the family, pushing Zarqawi to become a street thug, known for his fights, the terror he inspired, his heavy drinking and his nickname "the Green Man" because of his many tattoos.
Zarqawi is thus usually described as having been a high school dropout and a petty criminal in his youth, including, allegedly, a procurer of prostitutes.
1989–1998: Afghanistan War, returning to Jordan, time in prison
In the late 1980s, Zarqawi went to Afghanistan to join the Mujahideen who were fighting the invading Soviet troops. He arrived there in 1989, as the Soviets were already leaving. Instead of fighting, he became a reporter for an Islamist newsletter called Al-Bonian al-Marsous. On the other hand, Ahmed Hashim says that he did fight in the battles of Khost and Gardez, while the magazine, which translates as The Solid Edifice in English, was published in both Arabic and Urdu from the Hayatabad suburb of Peshawar in Pakistan, where he also met his future spiritual mentor, the influential Salafi jihadi ideologue Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, in 1990. It is also there that he celebrated the marriage of one of his seven sisters to Abu Qudama Salih al-Hami, a Jordanian-Palestinian journalist close to the Palestinian militant Abdullah Azzam, known for "resurrecting jihad" in modern times, because he was one-legged and he thought he couldn't find a suitable partner otherwise, while, years later, the same al-Hami would write a book entitled Fursan al-Farida al-Gha’iba (Knights of the Neglected Duty [of Jihad]), where he criticized Maqdisi's jihadi credentials after he parted ways with Zarqawi. Ultimately, he lived in Pakistan for some 10 years, mainly in and around Peshawar, and eventually became fluent in Pashto. Another sister married the Jordanian-Palestinian militant Khalid al-Aruri (alias Abu al-Qassam), "one of Zarqawi's closest lieutenants in Afghanistan", another married Haytham Mustafa Obeidat (alias Abu Hassan), "a veteran of the Afghan jihad", and yet another sister married the Jordanian Iyad Nazmi Salih Khalil (his aliases being Abu Julaybib al-Urduni and Iyad al-Tubasi), a veteran jihadi militant, who eventually would become the "third highest-ranking official" of the Al-Nusra Front in the Syrian Civil War, in 2016, before being killed in 2018.