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Islam’s holiest city, Zarqawi approached him with a request.
    “If you are to go on pilgrimage,” the youth said, “on your way there, pray to God that he may forgive Abu Musab.”
    Zarqawi’s first taste of actual combat came in 1991, when mujahideen rebels launched an offensive against government-held towns in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces of Paktia and Khost. Zarqawi fought with enthusiasm, and quickly gained a reputation for bravery bordering on foolhardiness, comrades remembered. Once, according to Azzam, he single-handedly held off a column of a dozen or more Afghan government troops during fighting in the eastern city of Gardez, allowing time for others in his unit to escape.
    “He was so brave, I used to say he had a dead heart,” Azzam said. As Azzam recalled it, Zarqawi’s heroics appeared to go beyond mererisk taking. He seemed at times to be trying to purge himself of something.
    “I was struck by the way his past seemed to affect him, as he always struggled with a sense of guilt,” Azzam said. “I think that is why he was so brave. He would say, ‘Because of the things I did in my past, nothing could bring Allah to forgive me unless I become a shahid ’—a martyr.”
    Zarqawi would never be a martyr, but in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan he earned his credentials as a mujahid—a holy warrior. By the time he left Afghanistan in 1993, he was a combat veteran with a few years of battlefield experience. He had been steeped in the doctrine of militant Islam, learning at the feet of radical Afghan and Arab clerics who would later ally themselves with the Taliban or with Osama bin Laden. He had gained formal military training at a camp operated by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Afghan rebel commander who would also mentor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
    Like the other Afghan fighters, he had also drunk from the heady cocktail of battlefield camaraderie and the rebels’ own improbable success. A ragtag army of Afghans and Islamist volunteers had humbled the Soviet superpower. How could such a thing be explained, except as an act of divine intervention?
    “God granted the Muslim mujahidin in Afghanistan victory against the infidels,” declared Sayf al-Adel, a deputy to Osama bin Laden, in a written account of the war. It was an opinion widely held among the veterans, and Zarqawi was utterly convinced of its truth.
    —
    In 1993, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and hundreds of other Jordanian veterans returned home to a country they barely recognized. But it wasn’t only Jordan that had changed. In four years, while Amman and the other big towns had grown larger and more modern, Zarqawi and his comrades had traveled backward in time by journeying to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a place that by almost every measure lagged centuries behind the rest of the world.
    Now back in his hometown, Zarqawi had become his self-chosennickname—“the Stranger.” Even a trip to the local market was a reminder of the gulf between moderate, easygoing Jordan and the strict Islamic discipline Zarqawi had witnessed in Afghanistan. He complained to friends about immodestly dressed Jordanian women and the mixing of unmarried couples at cafés and cinemas. He griped about the liquor stores and pornography vendors, which, years earlier, he himself had patronized. Even his own family disappointed him: his mother and sisters refused to wear the burka-style veil commonly worn by Afghan women, and his brothers allowed their families to watch un-Islamic movies and comedies on their TVs. The news shows that Zarqawi occasionally watched were even more upsetting, bringing reports of progress by both the Palestinians and the Jordanian monarchy in negotiating treaties with Israel. The very idea of peace with the Jewish state was anathema to many Islamists. Some formerly steadfast supporters of King Hussein never forgave the monarch for this act.
    Zarqawi would take a