In the summer of 2002, according to Jordanian court documents, Zarqawi organized a new plot to attack Western and Jewish targets in Jordan and began training a small band of fighters at a base in Syria. On Oct. 28, 2002, the group staged its first strike, fatally shooting a U.S. diplomat, Laurence M. "Larry" Foley, a senior administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, as he left his house in Amman.
The Jordanian indictment in that case alleges that Foley's assassins met with Zarqawi in Syria and received money for the operation from his network in Iraq. Despite evidence of his presence in their country, the Syrians, like the Iraqis, ignored requests from the United States and Jordan to extradite Zarqawi, according to Arab intelligence sources.
An Internet posting last week identified the killer of American contractor Eugene "Jack" Armstrong, kneeling, as Abu Musab Zarqawi, at center with knife.
(AP Television)
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Not long after, Zarqawi found refuge again in a third country in the region, Iran.
In February 2003, Zarqawi met at a safe house in eastern Iran with Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, al Qaeda's military chief, an Egyptian who is known as Saif Adel, and they discussed strategy for combining forces in Iraq to resist the anticipated U.S. invasion, Arab intelligence sources said. Zarqawi also traveled to Iran's rugged southwestern border with Iraq, where he spent time at a camp run by Muslim radicals who were experimenting with chemical weapons, Powell said in his speech to the United Nations.
By this time, Zarqawi's attention was focused squarely on Iraq, as he and other foreign fighters moved into the region and prepared to battle U.S. forces. In March, British intelligence warned that Zarqawi's network had set up sleeper cells in Baghdad to mount a resistance to the forthcoming U.S. occupation, according to a report made public this summer in London.
A Different Agenda
While Zarqawi has forged alliances with al Qaeda over the years, he has built a largely distinct network. His agenda is different, and there is evidence that he has clashed with al Qaeda leaders and on occasion seen them as rivals.
In the fall of 2001, according to German telephone wiretaps, Zarqawi grew angry when members of his Monotheism and Jihad cell in Germany told him they were also raising money for al Qaeda's local leadership. "If something should come from their side, simply do not accept it," Zarqawi told one of his followers, according to a recorded conversation that was played this month at a trial of four alleged Zarqawi operatives in Duesseldorf. "Just forget it!"
Gen. Hamidou Laanigri, head of the Moroccan security service, said that Zarqawi now rivals bin Laden in prominence among international terrorists and that there is friction between him and Ayman Zawahiri, the second-ranking figure in al Qaeda.
"Zarqawi is an operative that has never agreed with Zawahiri, the ideologue behind al Qaeda," Laanigri said in a rare interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro. "Zarqawi's position both in Iraq and outside is becoming more and more important. He is a specialist in clandestine activities; he can falsify documents, move around, has access to a variety of passports and has an amazing capacity to elude the authorities."
In January, the U.S. military captured a Zarqawi courier in Iraq who was carrying a 17-page letter addressed to al Qaeda's leaders believed to be hiding along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The letter, signed by Zarqawi, asked for money and reinforcements to fight the U.S.-led occupation forces in Iraq, beseeching al Qaeda to work as a team but also sounding a note of independence.
"We do not see ourselves as fit to challenge you," the letter read. Zarqawi said he would swear "fealty" to bin Laden if he sent help. If not, it added, "the disagreement will not spoil friendship" between the two.
Matthew Levitt, a former FBI counterterrorism official who works as an analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the relationship between Zarqawi's network and al Qaeda is part of a pattern among Islamic radicals. Alliances and linkages are constantly shifting, he said, depending on the task at hand and personalities involved.
"The bottom line is that the threat today is not so much from well-defined groups you can put in a pretty little box or on a flow chart," he said. "That's the nature of these things. There are connections, and there are overlaps."
Chemical Claims
U.S. officials say that Zarqawi has been trying to obtain chemical and biological weapons for years. In his U.N. speech, Powell asserted that Zarqawi's training camps, in Herat and in a Kurdish area of northern Iraq near the border with Iran, specialized in "poisons," adding that the network's operatives were being taught to produce ricin, an especially fatal toxin with no antidote.
U.S. and European officials said they broke up a Zarqawi-inspired plot to carry out ricin attacks in Britain and France in early 2002. But some European intelligence sources said there was no evidence that Zarqawi or his followers have mastered technology that would enable them to inflict mass casualties with toxic weapons.
A German intelligence official said that Monotheism and Jihad agents might have the capability to assassinate individuals with small doses of ricin but not to carry out a more widespread attack. "The chemical and biological weapons are overblown to a certain extent," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Jordanian authorities contend that the opposite is true. In April, the Jordanian government announced that it had disrupted a Zarqawi scheme to blow up the country's security services headquarters with trucks packed with enough chemicals and explosives to create a gas cloud that could have killed 80,000 people.
Officials said they killed four people in a shootout and seized trucks laden with 20 tons of chemicals, including blistering agents and nerve gas. The alleged ringleader confessed to the plot on television and said he was acting under Zarqawi's orders.
On April 30, Zarqawi issued a statement on the Internet admitting that he was behind the planned attack. While he denied that chemical weapons were involved, calling it "a pure lie," he added that he wished he had such a bomb.
"Yes, the plan was to completely destroy the Jordanian intelligence building," Zarqawi said in the statement. "As for the bomb being chemical and poisonous, that was an invention by the evil Jordanian Intelligence. . . . God knows that should we -- and we ask God to shortly empower us to -- possess that kind of bomb, we would not hesitate one second to use it on Israeli cities."
Correspondent Nora Boustany in Washington and special correspondent Shannon Smiley in Berlin contributed to this report.
