Free Black Flags by Joby Warrick Page A

to humiliate and assert his own dominance.
    He was twenty-one when he married his cousin, Intisar, who quickly bore him a daughter. ButZarqawi’s great love remained his mother. Dallah al-Khalayleh fretted over her troubled youngest son, but she never stopped believing in his basic goodness, or gave up her certitude that he would make something of himself. She also understoodher son’s intellectual limitations. Years later, when journalists would show up at her house to ask about Zarqawi’s reported accomplishments as a terrorist commander and bomb maker, she would seem genuinely amused.
    “He wasn’t that smart,” she told an American reporter. She allowed that her boy was “committed to Islam,” but explained his decision to join a jihadist movement as the only option available to a young man who couldn’t find a real job at home.
    “My son is a good man, an ordinary man, a victim of injustice,” she said.
    It was his mother who nudged Zarqawi into joining the Islamists. She signed him up for religion classes at the local al-Husayn Ben Ali Mosque, hoping he would find better role models among the imams and pious youth, with their theological debates and fundraising drives to benefit Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan. To everyone’s surprise, Zarqawi plunged into Islam with all the passion he had once reserved for his criminal pursuits. He swore off drinking and became a regular at Koran discussions and Friday prayers. He devoured propaganda videos and audiocassettes on the sectarian wars being fought in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. And when the prayer leader at the local mosque asked for volunteers to fight against the communist oppressors of Afghanistan’s Muslims, Zarqawi’s hand shot up.
    He arrived at the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier in the spring of 1989, weeks after the last Soviet troops withdrew, but just in time to join the Islamist assault on the pro-Moscow Afghan government that was left to fend for itself after the Russians pulled out. One of the Afghan veterans who greeted him at the airport would later remember a wiry young man who seemed eager but also oddly self-conscious. He said little, explaining at one point that he was embarrassed to speak, fearing he would betray his inadequate schooling and thin grasp of the Koran. Although it was already hot, he insisted on wearing long sleeves to cover up his tattoos.
    “We all knew who he was: he had been this notorious tough guy in Zarqa,” said Hudhaifa Azzam, a fellow Afghan-fighter and son of the influential Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, regarded by many asthe father of the global jihad movement. “Now he had found religion, and he was very much ashamed of his tattoos. You could see him covering up his hands self-consciously.”
    Zarqawi’s first assignment was to write articles for a jihadist magazine describing mujahideen exploits on the battlefield, a job that proved taxing for a young man of limited schooling. Among his first friends was Saleh al-Hami, a fellow journalist who had lost his leg to a land mine. Zarqawi spent long hours at the man’s bedside as he recovered, becoming so impressed with his devotion that he arranged to have one of his own sisters flown to Pakistan to marry the man. His new brother-in-law would later move to Jordan to become Zarqawi’s admiring biographer. Al-Hami remembered the young Zarqawi as highly emotional, and quick to cry whenever he read the Koran. Most of the Arab fighters tried to avoid such open displays, but not the Jordanian.
    “Zarqawi was crying whenever he said prayers aloud, even when leading the prayers,” al-Hami wrote.
    During breaks in training, Zarqawi wandered around the Pakistani city of Peshawar, sometimes visiting a local mosque that had become a favorite for Arab fighters. Years later, the mosque’s imam still vividly remembered the earnest young Jordanian who seemed preoccupied with past sins. One day, after the cleric mentioned his plans to travel to Mecca,