Face to Face With Terror

When he was picked for a secret mission one evening in early 2005, Ahmed Bakr felt no fear. He had been on many life-threatening assignments for al-Qaeda in Iraq. In comparison, taking a small package of high explosives to a village on the outskirts of Baghdad was almost an insult. “I thought, Why are they sending a fighter for such a simple job?” he says. But when he arrived at the given address, he began to sense that the mission might not be so petty after all. The modest house was guarded by fighters, one of whom recognized Bakr and waved him in. As he sat on a rug on the floor of the living room, he told himself this was clearly the hideout of an important figure. Then a man walked in from another room, greeting him in a quiet voice. It was Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq.

Bakr, a veteran of dozens of battles against U.S. troops, says he was instantly awestruck. “I could not feel my tongue, my hands, my legs … I could not move,” he says, his eyes widening at the very memory. “For a few moments I could not even think. My mind went completely blank.” Bakr says al-Zarqawi led him into another room, with prayer mats and copies of the Koran. “Come, let us pray,” al-Zarqawi said. Bakr says they prayed for about three hours, with al-Zarqawi reciting from memory several long surahs, or chapters from the Koran, in a whisper. From time to time, he broke into sobs and moans, babbling incoherently, as if in a trance. Afterward, Bakr was asked to join al-Zarqawi and some of his closest aides in a discussion on the life of the Prophet Muhammad that went on until dawn. It wasn’t until morning that al-Zarqawi gave Bakr a message to take back to his field commander. It was an order to launch a suicide-bombing operation.

Bakr spoke about his first meeting–and many others over several months–with al-Zarqawi in a recent interview with TIME in Baghdad. He admitted he was using a pseudonym and asked that some details of his experiences be omitted in order to avoid al-Zarqawi’s wrath. The anecdotes and other details in his account were verified by several sources, including a second al-Qaeda fighter who has spent some time close to al-Zarqawi, commanders of two Iraqi insurgent groups who have met the Jordanian-born terrorist, U.S. counterterrorism officials– who confirmed some aspects and cast doubt on others–and others who have tracked his career closely. Their accounts provide a rare and intimate portrait of a fugitive who, despite being the most feared man in Iraq, has also remained the most obscure. After three years in which al-Zarqawi has helped turn Iraq into a terrorist breeding ground and claimed responsibility for the deaths of hundreds, new images of his visage emerged last week for the first time in years when he appeared in a video released on the Internet. The video’s release coincided with the naming of Nouri al-Maliki as Iraq’s new Prime Minister, who the U.S. hopes can finally form a unity government that will begin to erode the strength of the insurgency. In the video, a bearded and black-clad al-Zarqawi fires a machine gun to show off his prowess as a fighter, then aims some verbal broadsides at the enemy. He accuses the U.S. of waging a crusade against Islam, adding, “By God, your dreams will be defeated by our blood and by our bodies.”

Such fiery rhetoric, though, masks a gradual but unmistakable effort by al-Zarqawi to recast his image. Based on interviews by TIME with Bakr and others who have associated with al-Zarqawi, a picture emerges of a cold-blooded killer trying to reinvent himself as a quasi-religious leader. He wants to be seen as a deeply spiritual Muslim whose actions are driven by a desire to save Islam from attacks from external and internal enemies, according to those sources. The most striking aspect of that transformation is al-Zarqawi’s attempt to mimic the sirah, or lifestyle, of the Prophet. Those who have seen al-Zarqawi in the past year say he constantly uses the written histories of the Prophet’s life, known collectively as the Hadith, to copy the way he spoke, sat, walked, ate and slept, even the way he brushed his teeth (the Prophet is recorded as having used the twigs of a particular bush). He has taken to using musk-scented oils and requiring his closest aides to be similarly anointed because Islamic history says the Prophet favored those traditional Arabic perfumes.

What explains such conspicuous expressions of piety? Some Western officials believe that al-Zarqawi may be trying to project a more moderate, appealing image to regain some of the prestige he has lost in recent months. Clashes between al-Qaeda, which mainly comprises foreign fighters, and homegrown Iraqi insurgent groups have been interpreted as an indication that al-Zarqawi is no longer the all-powerful figure leading the anti-U.S. forces in Iraq. He has also attracted criticism for his group’s deadly attacks on Iraqi Shi’ites.

But al-Zarqawi hasn’t lost his appetite for murder–or his determination to sow civil war in Iraq. Bakr says he recalls conversations in which al-Zarqawi raged at the Shi’ites. “Those were the only times I hear him shout,” he says. “He really hates the Shi’ites, even more than the Americans.” The terrorist leader may carry his Koran at all times, but his Kalashnikov is never far from his reach, as evidenced by last week’s video, in which he is clearly seen wearing an ammunition belt. Bakr and other sources say al-Zarqawi constantly wears a suicide-bomber’s belt, taking it off only to bathe, although a U.S. official questioned this. When al-Zarqawi is on the road, his car is said to be rigged to blow up at the throw of a switch. “He will never be taken alive,” says Loretta Napoleoni, author of Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation. “He may be getting more religious, but the mujahid in him wants to go down fighting.”

AL-ZARQAWI IS NO RELIGIOUS SCHOLAR. A high school dropout, he memorized the Koran while in prison and acquired his religious ideas from extremist preachers and thinkers in Afghanistan and Jordan. To devout Muslims, emulation of the Prophet is considered desirable, and most believers concentrate on Muhammad’s well-documented attributes, like frugality, modesty, charity and respect for elders. But al-Zarqawi, like others who subscribe to extremist schools of Islam, takes emulation literally. Among the examples Bakr cites is al-Zarqawi’s tendency, modeled on the Prophet’s, to “do everything from right to left: he puts on his right shoe first, washes his right hand first after a meal, talks to people sitting on his right.” (Al-Zarqawi’s status as a wanted man forces him to make some exceptions in his mimicking of Muhammad. While most of the literalist schools of Islam require that Muslims follow the Prophet’s example and keep full beards, al-Zarqawi, who frequently alters his appearance to throw off his pursuers, sometimes shaves. For the same reason, he can’t afford to dress as the Prophet did.)

Like many other literalists, al-Zarqawi favors one of the Koran’s more complex chapters, known as “The Cave.” It includes some metaphysical stories whose meaning has been debated by theologians for centuries. The Prophet is said to have advised his followers to read the “The Cave” before Friday prayers, and “some people mistakenly take this to mean that this surah was the Prophet’s favorite,” says Khaled Abou al-Fadl, an Islamic jurist at UCLA. Bakr says al-Zarqawi frequently quotes extensively from “The Cave” and encourages discussion about its stories.

For many Muslims, emulating Muhammad’s sirah is a deeply spiritual exercise, designed to make believers feel closer to God. In al-Zarqawi’s case, baser instincts may be at work. “People like al-Zarqawi try to portray themselves as very close to the Prophet in order to legitimize their other actions,” says al-Fadl. Those who have observed al-Zarqawi at close quarters suggest that this is the logical next step in his evolution as a jihadi. Once a street thug in his hometown of Zarqa, he turned himself into a mujahid, or holy warrior, in Afghanistan, and then an emir, or military chieftain, in Iraq. “At some point, every emir wants to become a sheik,” or religious leader, says the commander of an Iraqi insurgent group. “Since he was always quite religious, it is natural for him to grow in that direction.” He cites Osama bin Laden as an example of another mujahid who rose gradually to the status of sheik.

A U.S. counterterrorism official says al-Zarqawi’s attempts at reinvention may stem from tactical considerations that are due to the changing nature of his mission. Having fomented a sectarian conflict in Iraq–which he vowed to do as early as 2004–the Jordanian has been consciously adopting a lower profile. He went out of his way, for example, to set up a council of jihadist groups, under the leadership of Abu Abdallah Rashid al-Baghdadi, a previously unknown figure. The objective, says the official, is to put an Iraqi face on the jihad. “He’s savvy enough to realize he’s a foreigner in Iraq,” he says. Last week’s video bore the council’s name, Shura al-Mujahedin, although the black flag of al-Zarqawi’s group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was occasionally visible.

In the meantime, al-Zarqawi has also been working to expand his influence beyond Iraq, and his new mantle of religiosity will be especially useful in parts of the Islamic world where military skills are less important than the ability to inspire devotion among hard-line Muslims, as bin Laden has. “For somebody who wants to position himself as a leader in the Muslim community, it can be a very effective tactic,” says Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a prominent U.S.-based Muslim preacher and scholar.

Will it work for al-Zarqawi? Imam Abdul Rauf believes that most Muslims will see through the pretense and “recognize the wolf in the sheep’s clothing.” Many, he says, will be outraged by al-Zarqawi’s attempt to use the lifestyle of the Prophet in order to cover or justify his terrorist agenda. But, Imam Abdul Rauf says, “there will always be some people who will buy into it.”

In Iraq there are signs that the spiritual turn is bolstering al-Zarqawi’s stature. In separate interviews with two top military commanders of Iraq’s largest nationalist insurgent groups, it was clear that al-Zarqawi’s religiosity is making a deep impression. Both men have met the al-Qaeda leader; they say that he has always been very religious but that in recent months his faith has become more pronounced. Both commanders say their regard for al-Zarqawi has grown as a result of his transformation. “In the beginning, we thought of him as a hard man, a great fighter,” says one of the commanders. “But more recently, we’re seeing a different side, a spiritual side.” The other commander says meetings with al-Zarqawi, once brief encounters involving exchanges of intelligence and discussions about military tactics, are now dominated by spiritual matters. “He wants you to pray with him and to discuss religion,” says the second commander.

But, the commanders say, al-Zarqawi’s religiosity has not made him any less effective as a jihadi leader. If anything, it has made him more passionate about his cause and determined to kill for it. And he retains a full range of deadly skills. The commanders especially cite his expertise with explosives and an apparently photographic memory that enables him not only to recite the Koran but also to recall minutiae of military plans and remember obscure paths and hideouts in the giant Iraqi desert west of Baghdad. The U.S. counterterrorism official warns that al-Zarqawi’s transformation may make him more dangerous than ever. “He has become more politically savvy, but he hasn’t changed his stripes,” says the official. “He still considers violence to be a religious duty.” It is a duty he performs all too well.