New Paths to Power Emerge in Iraq

But it was not until 2003, in the months after Hussein's fall, that he won renown with a message as incendiary as it was harsh -- against the Americans, of the need to defend Sunnis against Shiites. Even today, some recall a sermon he delivered that November.

In it, he spoke of three men who competed to be the most vile. The first saw a woman carrying wood atop her head. He beat her. The second then tore off her clothes and raped her. The third stood back. When the others asked what he would do to prove his wickedness, the man laughed. That was my mother, he told them.

Khalil paused as he finished the story. The mosque fell silent. The mother, he declared, his voice rising again, represented Iraq, and the men were those betraying her.

"The occupation is like a cancer," he shouted, "and it has to be removed."

In those days, Khalil had insisted that he was only "fighting with his tongue." His zeal soon drew him into the ranks of an incipient insurgency, leading 30 armed men and meeting colleagues in Baghdad, where he sometimes sought shelter at the Um al-Qura mosque. He ventured to the Anbar province capital of Ramadi, towns in Diyala province, and across the border to Syria. The U.S. military jailed him twice: as prisoner No. 159705 when he spent nearly six months in the massive prison at Abu Ghraib in 2004, and as No. 200331 when he was incarcerated for a similar stint at Camp Cropper in Baghdad nearly two years later. By his count, U.S. soldiers searched his house 67 times. They occasionally brought dogs, he said, to inspect his mosque.

By August 2006, after a meeting in Homs, Syria, he had joined al-Qaeda in Iraq, a homegrown Sunni movement that U.S. officials say is led by foreigners and that embraced a radical strain of Islam.

Unlike other regions of Iraq, there was never any ambiguity in Thuluyah about the occupation. From the beginning, it was despised. The town was the scene of one of the first efforts at counterinsurgency, when 4,000 U.S. troops, along with helicopter gunships and armored vehicles, moved through in June 2003. They killed three males, including a 15-year-old whose body was left for hours, swelling under a burning sun.

But even the occupation's fiercest opponents were startled by the severity of al-Qaeda, which ruled Thuluyah for 16 months starting in 2006. Men deemed collaborators were dragged from their homes and cars, sometimes executed in the street with a bullet to the back of the head. One man, a policeman's brother, was beheaded with the dull edge of a shovel. In all, residents say, 216 people were killed. No one could smoke in the streets.

"In theory, it was good," Khalil said of al-Qaeda.

But he realized that what he deemed the excesses of implementation were turning sentiment against it. These days, he calls himself contrite; he said he only wanted to fight Americans, not Shiites in neighboring Balad and certainly not his own people. But he acknowledged, too, that he was eventually forced to weigh the costs and benefits.

"Four years of fighting, and we didn't achieve anything," he said in his house, adorned with a Koranic inscription on the wall that reads: "God forgives all sins. Truly, He is often forgiving and most merciful."

"That company went bankrupt," Khalil said matter-of-factly. There was little hint of penitence, less of remorse. "The past is closed now," he said. "It failed, and I don't like to remember the years of failure."