Other erstwhile allies of Zarqawi have expressed similar misgivings about his approach. Abu Mohammed Maqdisi, a radical Jordanian cleric who became Zarqawi's mentor when both were imprisoned in the late 1990s, said in August that Zarqawi was hurting their shared cause by launching suicide attacks that often killed Muslim women and children "but barely one or two occupier Americans."
Maqdisi, also known as Isam Mohammad Taher Barqawi, said Zarqawi was making a serious tactical mistake by targeting Shiite Muslims. Shiites make up a majority of the population in Iraq, but Zarqawi, a Sunni, regularly denounces them as apostates.
"I am not ashamed or embarrassed at all to say that I do not sanction it, support it or approve it," Maqdisi told al-Jazeera television in July. "You blow up a Shiite mosque and the Shiites blow up a Sunni mosque and the circle of conflict shifts from fighting the occupier enemy. It becomes communal fighting between two factions who should be in one camp against the occupier."
Zarqawi has ignored the advice and has continued to target Muslims suspected of helping U.S. forces, the Iraqi government and other foes. On Friday, his network posted an Internet statement asserting that it had executed six North African contractors in Iraq accused of "supporting the infidels."
The same day, after thousands of Jordanians took to the streets to protest the Amman bombings and to denounce Zarqawi, his organization posted another statement. It said the Amman hotels were chosen as targets because they were known gathering places for intelligence agents from the United States, Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
But the statement also rebuked the protesters, calling them hypocrites for remaining silent about Muslims killed or wounded by U.S. forces in Iraq. "By God, we did not see from them at any time sadness about Muslim spilled blood every day" in Iraq, it read.
Despite their differences, Zarqawi and the founders of al Qaeda share an overarching goal: to unify all Muslim lands under a caliphate, or a single theocratic state.
Since the late 1990s, bin Laden and al Qaeda strategists have sought to accomplish that primarily by attacking what they refer to as "the far enemy" -- the United States, Europe and other nations that have forged alliances with the secular states of the Middle East. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the train bombings in Madrid in March 2004 and the subway bombings in London last July all were designed to press Western powers to withdraw military forces from the Middle East and cease their support for countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Zarqawi has carved his own path, however, by taking a more direct approach and fighting closer to home, both in Jordan and in Iraq. In contrast with al Qaeda's penchant for airplane hijackings and other catastrophic plots, Zarqawi operates more as a guerrilla fighter, relying on roadside bombs, kidnappings and suicide attacks.
The Amman bombings were not the first time Zarqawi had launched an attack on Jordan from his base in Iraq. In August, his followers fired Katyusha rockets at U.S. ships in the Red Sea port of Aqaba, but missed.
In April 2004, the Jordanian government said it had disrupted a Zarqawi plot to blow up the headquarters of the Jordanian intelligence service. It said the plot involved truckloads of chemical-laced explosives that could have created a gas cloud with the potential to kill 80,000 people.
Unlike bin Laden, Zarqawi has also placed a high priority on fighting Israel and has tried -- unsuccessfully -- to organize bombings and suicide attacks there, according to Arab intelligence sources.
Jordanians Rally to Condemn Bombings