Zarqawi attains mythic status in his Jordanian hometown

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.

Disputed details

No one knows for sure whether the Sunni fundamentalist is still hiding out in the Iraqi rebel stronghold of Fallujah. Many opponents of American policy view him as an invention — rather than a terrorist mastermind with cells all over Iraq, the Caucasus and Western Europe.

Whatever the truth, coalition intelligence officers certainly accept his claims that he has organized the killings of hundreds in Iraq and personally beheaded Westerners — including British engineer Kenneth Bigley, killed Oct. 7 by his kidnappers after three weeks in captivity. A videotape of his beheading was delivered to an Arabic television channel the next day.

The myth of Zarqawi grows by the hour. Zarqawi, 38 this month, once was just like the tag-playing boys in his hometown, a child from a settled Bedouin family who enjoyed playing soccer on the dusty ground. He supported Ramtha, the local soccer team, and cheered for Argentina.

“I hope to be like him,” one of the small boys said. “He’s big in America. He makes us hold our heads up high.”

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