BAGHDAD, June 8: Al-Qaeda front man Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose death was announced on Thursday, was one of the world’s most wanted men who for years evaded capture both in Iraq and his homeland Jordan.

The militant leader topped a US most-wanted list in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s downfall in April 2003, and long remained elusive despite a huge reward and relentless military pressure.

US military leaders repeatedly described him and Al-Qaeda as the biggest obstacle to peace — and their biggest enemy — in Iraq.

Zarqawi’s ruthlessness in fighting the Americans in Iraq brought him fame that at times has rivalled Osama bin Laden’s as public enemy number one in the United States’ ‘war on terror’.

The 39-year-old militant, who helped introduced gruesome tactics like beheadings and suicide bombings in Iraq, last appeared in Internet video in April vowing to defeat the United States and ‘chase’ America out of Iraq ‘defeated and humiliated’.

If only to reassert his mystique and outlaw appeal, the Zarqawi video, which appeared just two days after a new audiotape recording of Osama bin Laden surfaced, showed a paunchy thick-bearded man gripping a light-machine gun.

Unlike Osama, Zarqawi had never before released a videotaped message, preferring to remain an enigmatic figure. Only grainy identity shots, old images from Afghanistan and more recent photos of a grizzled figure gave any clue as to his appearance.

Zarqawi last made a splash in November when he claimed his group had carried out suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman which killed 60 people.

Those attacks, along with a failed rocket strike on US warships in the Gulf of Aqaba last August, brought his fight from Iraq across the border to his birthplace of Jordan.

Ironically it was Jordan’s King Abdullah who in 1999 freed as part of a general amnesty the man he later referred to as a ‘street thug’.

Recently Zarqawi, who had a US bounty of 25 million dollars on his head and was anointed in Dec 2004 by Osama as Al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, had taken a lower profile.

The son of Osama’s mentor Abdullah Azzam said in April that Iraq’s resistance has replaced Zarqawi as political head of the guerillas, confining him to a strictly military role.

The apparent demotion raised speculation that Zarqawi’s readiness to kill civilians and his foreign nationality had cost him supporters among Iraqi Islamists, who had rallied to the fight against US forces in the country.

The fighter’s mystique suffered another chink in his armor when the US military was forced to deny it had exaggerated the importance of Zarqawi as part of a propaganda campaign to turn Iraqis against the resistance.

The Washington Post reported that some military intelligence officials believed the campaign had overstated Zarqawi’s importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war in Iraq to the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

But Zarqawi’s story from his humble origins in Jordan to his transformation into a face of terror has always been shrouded in mystery.

Born Fadel Nazzal al-Khalayleh, Zarqawi was a poor student who never graduated from high school.

People in his hometown of Zarqa, from where he gets his name, remember a hot-headed youth, always armed with a pen-knife and a tattoo on his arm.

He became a radical for two reasons, those who knew him said.

He was shocked by the social openness that emerged in conservative Jordan with the arrival of tens of thousands of Palestinians who fled Kuwait after Iraq invaded the Gulf emirate in 1990.

He was also reportedly marked by a dream one of his sisters had, in which a sword came from the heavens bearing the word ‘jihad’ on one side and a verse from the holy Quran saying ‘God will never abandon you and will never forget you’.

“This vision convinced him that he had a calling for an important role, “ a former acquaintance said.

After a period of run-ins with the law, Zarqawi became awed by the teachings of radical Salafist Mohamad al-Makdessi, whom he met in Pakistan, where he worked as a journalist from 1988-1992 for mujahideen newspapers.

In Jordan, Zarqawi was tried and sentenced in 1994 to 15 years in prison for membership in an illegal group and arms possession.

During the first eight months of his imprisonment, he memorised the Quran and continued to study the holy book during his incarceration at Swaqa prison between 1995 and 1997.

A veteran of the Afghan war against Soviet occupation, a US-backed conflict in the 1980s that drew many Muslim idealists, his encounter with Osama took place in 2000 during visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In late 2001, he was wounded in combat after taking up arms against US-led forces fighting to unseat the Taliban.

Zarqawi had already been sentenced to death by Jordan for planning the Oct 2002 murder of USAID diplomat Laurence Foley, who was gunned down at point-blank range outside his home in Amman.

He also stood accused of plotting an attack on Jordan’s intelligence agency using trucks loaded with 20 tons of chemicals that officials say could have killed 80,000 people and injured 160,000 others.—AFP