by Joby Warrick
The owner of the scar studied the rows of bunks for a long moment, then turned to lock his gaze on the visitor. The face was unremarkable, fleshy, with full lips framed by a thin beard. But the eyes were unforgettable. Deep-set and nearly black in the low prison light, they conveyed a cold intelligence, alert and probing, but lacking any trace of emotion. Neither welcoming nor hostile, his look was that of a snake studying the fat young mouse that had just dropped into his cage.
At last the warden spoke. He mumbled words of introduction for the new doctor, and then declared the start of clinic hours. All prisoners with medical complaints can step forward to be examined, he said.
Sabha edged closer to the door to await the inevitable rush. He had prepared for the moment and had brought along a supply of pills and salves to treat the rashes, minor wounds, allergies, and gastric ailments common to men living in close confinement. But, to his surprise, no one stirred. The inmates sat motionless, waiting for a sign from the scarred man, who at last turned his gaze on an inmate seated on a bed near the front of the cell. When he gave a slight nod, the seated prisoner stood and walked to the doorway without a sound. He nodded a second time, and a third, and, one by one, inmates took their place in line in front of the doctor.
Five men, and only five, were summoned, and still the man with the scar had not uttered a word. He turned to the doctor with the same reptilian stare, the look of a man who possessed, even in Jordan’s harshest prison, absolute control.
Sabha felt an uneasiness, like a tremor welling up from somewhere deep in the foundation of the old fortress. “What kind of person,” he wondered, “can command with only his eyes?”
—
Over the following days, the doctor scoured files for insights into his new patients and why prison officials had come to fear them. The group’s core, he learned, consisted of about two dozen men who had been members of radical Islamic sects that sprang up in Jordan in the early 1990s. With the exception of the leader, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi—a firebrand preacher known for penning screeds against Arab leaders—their individual histories were unimpressive. Some had been street thugs who had gotten religion and found acceptance and purpose among the zealots. Others had been part of the Arab volunteer army that had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Back home in safe, stable Jordan, these men had been drawn to organizations that offered a way to relive the glories of the Afghan campaign through perpetual holy war against the enemies of Islam.
Their efforts at jihad in Jordan had been anything but glorious. The leaders of Maqdisi’s small band had been arrested before they could carry out their first operation, a planned attack on an Israeli border post. The other groups’ targets had consisted of small-time symbols of Western corruption, from liquor stores to video shops and pornographic movie houses. One of the early attempts at a bombing had been a spectacular failure: A member of the group had volunteered to plant explosives inside a local adult cinema called the Salwa. After a few minutes in the theater, the would-be assailant had become so engrossed in the film that he forgot about his bomb. As he sat, glued to the screen, the device detonated under his feet. No patrons were hurt, but the bomber lost both his legs. Six years later, the double-amputee was among Sabha’s charges at al-Jafr Prison. The doctor had noticed him on his first visit, propped up on his bunk, his pant legs neatly pinned at the knee.
By now, nearly all the men had been locked up for four years or more. But if prison was meant to break the jihadists and weaken their cause, the attempt was an utter failure. Confined mostly in the same communal cells, the men had been bound together by their privations and by the daily struggle to persevere as religious purists among drug dealers, thieves, and killers. They shared a common creed, an austere brand of Islam invented by Maqdisi and inculcated during endless weeks of confinement. They also possessed an uncommon discipline. The group behaved as a military unit, with clear chains of authority and unquestioned obedience to Maqdisi’s handpicked enforcer, the scarred, thick-chested man who had made such an impression during Sabha’s first visit to the prison. Maqdisi told the men what to think, but his number two controlled everything else: how the men spoke and dressed, which books they read and which television shows they watched, whether they accepted or resisted prison dictates, when and how they fought. The man’s given name was Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, but he preferred to be called “al-Gharib,” or “the Stranger,” a handle he had picked up during his days as a fighter in the Afghan civil war. Some, however, were already calling him “the one from Zarqa,” the tough industrial town in northern Jordan where he grew up. The phrase in Arabic is “al-Zarqawi.”
Sabha was able to observe both leaders up close. The Maqdisi he saw was mild and agreeable, more amiable professor than beguiling mystic. At just shy of forty, he had the weary air of an intellectual who felt he deserved better company than the few dozen backward men who shared his cell. He freely dispensed religious advice and the occasional fatwa, or religious ruling, but he preferred spending his time in solitary pursuits, writing essays and reading the Koran. On the printed page, Maqdisi was fearless: he gained renown throughout the Muslim world for inflammatory books with titles such as Democracy Is a Religion, in which he denounced secular Arab regimes as anti-Islamic and called for their destruction. His work eventually gained such resonance among Islamists that a Pentagon-commissioned study in 2006 would call him the most important new thinker in the jihadi intellectual universe.
Previous Islamist ideologues also had criticized leaders of the Arab world as corrupt and unfaithful to the religion. The same themes appeared in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the influential Egyptian author whose works inspired the founders of al-Qaeda. But in Maqdisi’s view, each Muslim bore a personal obligation to act when confronted with evidence of official heresy. It wasn’t enough for the faithful simply to denounce corrupt rulers. They were compelled by Allah to slaughter them.
“His radical conclusion was that the leaders were infidels, and Muslims should kill them,” said Hasan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian writer and intellectual who was friendly with Maqdisi during the years when his ideas were beginning to congeal. “The ‘killing’ was the turning point. It was a message that resonated with Muslims who felt that the regimes were stupid and had allowed foreigners to occupy Arab lands. For these people, Maqdisi was not only validating their views but telling them they were obliged to do something about it.”
Oddly enough, the man who called so bluntly for confronting Islam’s enemies tended to shy away from conflict. As Sabha observed, whenever interrogators and agents of the intelligence services visited the prison, he would greet them politely and ask about their families, to the dismay of other inmates who had suffered at the hands of the same men. He would patiently explain to guards and prison officers why they and their government were heretics, buttressing his arguments with quotes from the Koran. But he would often retreat when challenged, allowing that less severe interpretations of scripture could also be valid.
“You can be a member of Parliament and still be a good Muslim,” he told Sabha one day, offering a nuance that seemed to contradict his central thesis about the evils of nontheocratic governance. “If someone is elected because he wants to serve the people, that’s being a good Muslim. But if he believes in democracy—if he believes in rules made by men—he is an infidel.”
Maqdisi seemed fond of the young physician, who, though secular, was the only other person at al-Jafr with an advanced degree. Their relationship took a turn one day when the youngest of Maqdisi’s wives fell ill during a visit to the desert prison. The woman suffered from unusual menstrual bleeding, and Sabha arranged to see her at his private clinic in the village. The gesture might have risked offense—many ultra-conservative Muslim men refuse to allow their wives to be seen by male doctors—but Maqdisi seemed genuinely grateful. After that day, the physician’s visits to the cell block were greeted with wide grins.
But politeness and intellect are poor instruments for commandin
g men in such a hard place as al-Jafr. Maqdisi needed an enforcer. In Zarqawi, he had found the perfect helper: a man with the distinction of being at once slavishly devoted and utterly ruthless. “He is very tough,” Maqdisi would say admiringly, referring to his number two, “and he is a Jordanian’s Jordanian—a man of the tribe.”
Their personalities could hardly have been more different. Zarqawi had no capacity for warmth or nuance. The man with the scar did not smile. He did not return greetings from prison employees, or engage in their small talk. When he spoke at all, it was with the street slang of a high-school dropout who had grown up as a brawler and petty criminal in one of Zarqa’s toughest neighborhoods. His gruffness and refusal to conform to convention had marked him as a troublemaker since boyhood. They also helped burnish the legend that was already beginning to cement around Zarqawi in his thirty-third year.
Whereas Maqdisi preferred the ethereal world of books and ideas, Zarqawi was purely a physical being, with a compact, muscular frame that he chiseled through weight lifting, using buckets of stones as barbells. The whispered stories of his criminal past—the stabbings and beatings, the pimping and drug dealing—made him seem dangerous and unpredictable, a man of action, capable of anything.
He had fought bravely, even recklessly, in Afghanistan, and his reputation for impulsive violence had followed him into prison. He habitually defied authorities in the first of the jails where he and the others were confined, and he brutalized and humiliated inmates who crossed him, sometimes with fists or crude weapons and sometimes, it was widely said, sexually. Once, in a rage, he had grabbed a prison guard by his uniform collar and suspended him from a coat hook. Another time, he instigated a violent protest by inmates armed with crude clubs and swords fashioned from bed frames. “We have come to die!” the prisoners had screamed, and some surely would have, except for the timely intervention of a warden who acceded to many of the jihadists’ demands.
Under Maqdisi’s tutelage, Zarqawi’s attacks subsided, but the violent energy simply shifted form. Zarqawi began memorizing the Koran, spending hour after hour reading, or staring blankly with the open volume in his lap. His diffuse rage took on a focus: a fierce, single-minded hatred for perceived enemies of Allah. The list started with Jordan’s monarch, King Hussein, whom Zarqawi saw as the illegitimate leader of an artificial country, responsible for the unspeakable crime of making peace with Israel. It also included servants of the regime: the guards, the soldiers, the politicians, the bureaucrats, and countless others who profited from the current system. Even prison inmates he denounced as kafirs, or disbelievers. To Muslims the term is no mere epithet; if used in a fatwa, it implies that the person has lost the protection of Islamic law and can be killed with impunity. Within the prison, the guards began referring to Zarqawi and his closest followers as al-takfiris—“the excommunicators.”
At the same time, Zarqawi began taking a stronger hand as a leader and an enforcer among the Islamist prisoners. He demanded the absolute obedience of the men, and he berated them whenever they skipped prayers or watched television news shows anchored by women who were not veiled. Despite his harsh manner, he won admirers because of his fearless defiance of prison authority. When official visitors came to al-Jafr, Zarqawi would often ignore them and refuse even to acknowledge their greetings. And he would order his men to do the same.
One day, after Jordan agreed to open its prisons to inspections from human-rights groups, a senior Interior Ministry official arrived at al-Jafr to check on conditions and implore the inmates not to say anything negative to the foreigners. The Islamists refused to answer his questions or even look at him.
The exasperated official first scolded the men, then tried to cajole them into cooperating with suggestions that their sentences could be reduced.
“God willing, King Hussein will pardon you!” he said.
Zarqawi stood suddenly and jabbed a finger just inches from the bureaucrat’s nose.
“This master is not our master!” he snarled. “Ours is Allah almighty.”
The visitor snapped. “I swear to God, you will not leave!” he shouted. “You will stay in this prison!”
“By Allah,” Zarqawi replied coldly, “we will come out. Forcibly, if God wills.”
—
There was another side to Zarqawi. Sabha would catch occasional glimpses of it during his prison visits. It was jarringly incongruous with Zarqawi’s usual behavior, as though he suffered from a split personality.
Everyone at al-Jafr knew how Zarqawi worshipped his mother, how he became like a little boy whenever she visited. He would prepare for days, scrubbing his clothes in the sink and tidying up his corner of the cell. Some inmates knew about his love letters to her, and to his sisters. Scarcely a word was mentioned about Zarqawi’s wife, Intisar, or their two young children. But to his mother and sisters he wrote gushing notes adorned with poems and hand-drawn flowers in the margins.
“Oh, sister, how much you have suffered on account of my imprisonment for the sake of my religion,” he wrote to Umm Qadama in one carefully scrawled note with alternating blue and red ink. He closed with a poem:
I wrote you a letter, O my sister,
Which I made of my soul’s desire.
The first thing I write is the fire of my heart,
And the second is my love and longing.
The other objects of Zarqawi’s exaggerated attentions were the sick and injured among his men. When any of the Islamists fell ill, he put himself in the role of heroic caregiver, giving up his own blankets and rations to ensure their comfort. He hovered over Sabha and a second doctor who joined the prison staff, hectoring them whenever he felt his men were being shortchanged.
“Where’s the medicine you promised for this one?” he would demand, according to Sabha’s recollection. Once, when one of the inmates left al-Jafr for a few days of hospital therapy, he fretted like a nervous parent, nagging Sabha for news about the man’s condition.
Sabha was particularly struck by the tenderness Zarqawi displayed toward the most fragile of the inmates, the double-amputee named Eid Jahaline, the unlucky bomber who flubbed the attack on the pornographic cinema. Jahaline, who suffered from a psychological disorder in addition to his physical disfigurement, had always bunked with the other Islamist inmates in spite of extreme disabilities. Zarqawi appointed himself as the man’s personal valet, and assisted him with his bathing, changing, and feeding. Most days, he would simply scoop up the legless man in his arms and carry him to the toilet. Sabha suspected that the daily ritual had as much to do with Zarqawi’s peculiar sense of propriety as with genuine compassion for his comrade. Under the Islamists’ strict moral code, exposing the man’s naked body to others would constitute both a humiliation and a sin.
One evening, while Sabha was visiting the cell, Jahaline suffered one of his occasional meltdowns, a screaming fit that usually required treatment with antipsychotic drugs. Sabha grabbed a syringe and was preparing to administer the shot when Zarqawi stepped forward to block him. Without a word, Zarqawi took a blanket from one of the beds and draped it over Jahaline’s lower body. He held the blanket in place with one hand, and with the other he tugged at the elastic waistband of the disabled man’s trousers, exposing a narrow crescent of skin. Then he motioned to the doctor.
“Just make sure it’s in the right spot,” he commanded.
Sabha felt for Jahaline’s pelvic bone through his clothes and, satisfied, pushed the needle into the pale flesh.
When it was done and Jahaline was resting quietly, Sabha looked up to find Zarqawi watching him with a look of satisfaction. There was something different in the reptilian eyes, a quality that the doctor had not noticed before. He thought it might have been the stirrings of a smile.
—
The arrival of winter in 1998 brought freezing temperatures and scores of newcomers, as prison officials sought to relieve overcrowding elsewhere in the system. The Islamists remained cloistered together, as always, but now subtle cra
cks were beginning to show. Some of the jihadists were openly suggesting that Zarqawi should be the leader, replacing Maqdisi, whose professorial demeanor had begun to grate on some members of the group.
Zarqawi made no move against his mentor, but the feelings of many inmates were quite clear. Maqdisi’s nuanced theological arguments were lost on the high-school dropouts and petty criminals who made up much of the group. These men preferred someone with tough-guy credentials, like Zarqawi, a brawler who talked plainly and refused to compromise. As he himself admitted, Maqdisi was no warrior. Even while living in Arab training camps in Afghanistan, he had given up on learning how to use a gun.
“He was not a fighter who lived between the bullets, the missiles and the tanks, even for a day!” one of the Afghan veterans later explained.
Zarqawi clearly liked being in charge, and he gradually took on a still more dominant role, with his mentor’s blessing, leaving Maqdisi to oversee spiritual matters. For the first time, important people outside prison were beginning to hear his name. Maqdisi had many admirers within the Islamist movement’s diaspora, from London to the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, and some of them were men with resources and extensive connections throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Now they were learning through Maqdisi about his impressive assistant, an Afghan veteran of unusual courage and natural leadership ability.
