Zarqawi attains mythic status in his Jordanian hometown

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ZARQA, Jordan -- Here in a depressed industrial town on the dusty road from Amman, the capital, he is remembered as an ordinary, if somewhat wayward, young man called Ahmed Khalayleh, who later took his nom de guerre from his birthplace.

The Khalayleh home is still here -- a drab, white building with a large satellite dish on the roof. Outside, grubby-faced children swarm around at the rare sight of a foreigner. Two young boys are playing tag.

"You're Abu Musab," cries Saddam Aoudi, 10.

"No, you're Abu Musab," his friend shouts back.

Behind the myth of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the West's new boogeyman, is the soft-featured terrorist who started out here as a tattooed small-town thug.

In the dimmed recesses of the American military operations rooms dotted across Iraq, they call him "the Z-man." Intelligence specialists dedicated to studying him are referred to reverentially as "Zarqeologists."

Zarqawi seems to be everywhere and yet nowhere, plotting terrorist attacks in Britain, Spain and Jordan, while moving like a specter through Iraq's heart of darkness. Files labeled "Top Secret" bulge with details of his life, but much of the lore surrounding him is suspected to be rumor or misinformation.

A U.S. Marine Corps profile noted that he has a "possible prosthetic leg," a "possible shoulder injury" and a "possible Jordanian accent." He likes to travel alone, it revealed, as an "unassuming businessman" in a red Pontiac, gold sedan, white van or "any vehicle."

But the rumors about his prosthetic leg have been revised. "He's understood to walk with a limp," said one source.

Zarqawi also is thought to use a personal digital assistant and take Zantac tablets -- a common indigestion remedy.