Word: mousab
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mousab Al-Zarqawi didn't have to be in a room to silence it. Dozens of times in the past three years, I have sat with insurgent leaders, listening to their bombastic pronouncements and boastful tales of "victorious battles" against U.S. forces, complete with verbal sound effects of gunfire and explosions. On such occasions, there was only one sure way to quiet them down: ask about al-Zarqawi. Suddenly, they would begin talking in hushed tones, almost whispers--as if saying his name out loud might conjure him like a malevolent spirit...
Many of those men had worked with al-Zarqawi, plotted with him, fought alongside him. But they remained in awe of him, citing his capacity to take any situation and bend it to his will. "Three years ago, Abu Mousab was asking us for advice on how to start a jihad in Iraq," said an insurgent commander who had first met al-Zarqawi in Fallujah in the weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "But in a few months, we were, one way or another, fighting the jihad by his rules...
...turned him into a figure of myth and legend. A top commander of al-Nasser Salaheddin, an insurgent group, told TIME last month, "When children in Fallujah and Ramadi play war games, some will be mujahedin, others will be Americans, but the role everybody wants to play is Abu Mousab. The biggest, toughest boy will get that role...
...dinner party had gathered last Wednesday evening in a farmhouse in the fertile, fruit-growing countryside just outside Baqubah, 30 miles north of Baghdad. One of the attendees was Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. With him were at least three women and three men, including Sheik Abdul-Rahman, al-Zarqawi's so-called spiritual adviser and confidant. Also in the house was one of al-Zarqawi's most trusted couriers, an aide tasked with relaying messages from the commander to militants in the field. What al-Zarqawi could not have known was that...
...Mousab al-Zarqawi had eluded U.S. forces for years. A special team of intelligence operatives was tracking his spiritual adviser, hoping for a break...