Free Black Flags by Joby Warrick

tattoos poking out below the sleeve.
    “He was angry, just screaming curses: ‘You are kafir s. You are infidels,” the officer recalled.
    Then it was back to the Mukhabarat’s fortresslike headquarters for the interrogation. Among those looking in on the suspects was Samih Battikhi, the agency’s worldly, silver-maned deputy chief. He watched as his men, working in a small, glaringly lit cell, tried in turns to wear the suspect down. Zarqawi was having none of it, he recalled.
    “He just spouted ideology. His head was full of it,” Battikhi said.
    Battikhi, who would soon be named director of the spy agency, had been watching with growing unease the stream of Jordanian nationals returning home after fighting under the mujahideen army’s Islamist banner in Afghanistan. At first, he recalled, the Jordanians who volunteered for duty in Afghanistan “were the good guys, fighting the communists,” in ideological lockstep with the country’s most important allies, including the Americans, the British, and the Saudis. Now they were returning home as combat veterans with radically different views, and even different ways of speaking and dressing. Zarqawi looked and sounded like the others, but with an aggressiveness that reminded Battikhi of a caged animal. It was widely known that Zarqawi had been a vicious brawler and petty criminal as a youth. Battikhi now wondered if the two parts of his personality had fused together—the gangster and the religious fanatic.
    “He didn’t fit the profile,” Battikhi said. “Here’s a guy who had been a thug and a drunk. His family had gotten worried and tried to steer him toward religious groups to straighten him out. But then it was like he went too straight. So now you’ve got the worst of both worlds.”
    —
    In fact, the Mukhabarat knew a lot about Zarqawi, even in those early days before prison. Between his thick police file and the spy agency’s legions of informants, the officers were quickly able to fill in the remaining blanks.
    Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, as the records showed, had beentroubled since childhood, taking the hard path from vandalism to drugs and alcohol to more serious crimes. He was born October 30, 1966, to parents of working-class Jordanian stock: a civil-servant father who worked for Zarqa’s municipal government, and a devoutly religious mother who doted on the young boy above his seven sisters and two brothers. The family lived in a modest two-story house perched on a hill above a large cemetery where Zarqa’s working class buries its dead. The graveyard is a shambles, a few thousand crumbling, hand-lettered tombstones strewn across a sloping lot overrun with weeds and feral cats; it is also the closest thing in the neighborhood to a public park. The boy who would become Abu Musab al-Zarqawi spent countless hours playing in the cemetery as a child; later, when he was a teen, the graves became the backdrop for his first forays into delinquency and crime.
    The Khalaylehs came from a large and respectable East Bank tribe, the Bani Hassans, a biographical fact that normally carried certain advantages for a young man looking to make connections and find work in a patriarchal society like Jordan. But Zarqawi had blown one opportunity after another. He dropped out of high school, despite above-average grades and test scores showing an aptitude for art. He skated through two years of compulsory military service, but then got himself fired from a city job his father had arranged for him. His criminal career began at age twelve—he had cut a neighborhood boy in a street fight—and progressed to pimping, drug dealing, and assault. By his late teens, he had acquired tattoos and a reputation as a heavy drinker and street tough who took pleasure in brutalizing his victims and opponents with fist or blade. His idea of a sexual conquest—according to security officials and to acquaintances who knew him at the time—was to force himself on younger men as a way