Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi - Terrorist

Terrorist

In 1989, Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan to join the insurgency against the Soviet invasion, but the Soviets were already leaving by the time he arrived. There he met and befriended Osama bin Laden. Instead of fighting, he became a reporter for an Islamist newsletter. There are reports that in the mid-1990s, Zarqawi traveled to Europe and started the al-Tawhid paramilitary organization, a group dedicated to installing an Islamic regime in Jordan.

Zarqawi was arrested in Jordan in the 1990s after guns and explosives were found in his home, and spent six years in a Jordanian prison. While in prison, he attempted to draft his cell mates into joining him to overthrow the rulers of Jordan. "You were either with them or against them. There was no gray area," a former prison mate told Time magazine in 2004. Zarqawi became a feared leader among inmates there. In prison he met and befriended Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein, who later published a book on Zarqawi.

Upon his release from prison in 1999, Zarqawi was involved in an attempt to blow up the Radisson Hotel in Amman, where many Israeli and American tourists lodged. He fled Jordan and traveled to Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border. In Afghanistan, Zarqawi established a militant training camp near Herat, near the Iranian border. The training camp specialized in poisons and explosives. Zarqawi met with Saif al-Adel and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and explained he intended to set up his own training camp in Herat for Jordanian militants.

Jordanian and European intelligence agencies discovered that Zarqawi formed the group Jund al-Sham in 1999 with $200,000 of start up money from Osama bin Laden. The group originally consisted of 150 members. It was infiltrated by members of Jordanian intelligence, and scattered before Operation Enduring Freedom. However, in March 2005, a fragment of the group carried out a bombing in Doha, Qatar. Sometime in 2001, Zarqawi was arrested in Jordan but was soon released. He was later convicted in absentia and sentenced to death for plotting the attack on the Radisson SAS Hotel.

After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, Zarqawi returned to help repel the assault, where he suffered cracked ribs following the collapse of a bombed house.

The Bush Administration used the possibility of Zarqawi's presence in Iraq before March 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq; recently declassified Pentagon documents reveal that there was no substantial link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Zarqawi was the most wanted man in Jordan and Iraq, having participated in or masterminded a number of violent actions against Iraqi, Jordanian and United States targets. The US government offered a $25m reward for information leading to his capture, the same amount offered for the capture of bin Laden before March 2004. On October 15, 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. On February 24, 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice's FBI also added al-Zarqawi to the "Seeking Information – War on Terrorism" list, the first time that he had ever been added to any of the FBI's three major "wanted" lists.