What a loser. at 17, he dropped out of high school in the small industrial city of Zarqa in Jordan. One of 10 children of a Bedouin herbal healer, he quickly developed a reputation as a drunk and a rabble-rouser. By one account, he was jailed for Sexual assault, and took up the ideology of jihad in prison. After his release, he drifted for a while and then went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. But by the time he got there, the war was over. So he got a job in Afghanistan with a small jihadist newspaper, even though he was nearly illiterate, writing in a child's scrawl. Back in his homeland, his first ter- rorist operation, in 1993, was an utter failure, and he and his confederates were jailed until 1999. He was freed in an amnesty. Then he returned to Afghanistan, but was apparently rejected by Al Qaeda, instead running his own training camp in Herat. "He had no learning," says a former Jordanian intelligence officer. "He was a thug." Yet today, at 37, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi has managed to become the most wanted man in Iraq.
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