The man who held the knife
It took the masked men almost 20 seconds to decapitate Nicholas Berg, the American civilian who fell into the hands of ruthless assassins in Iraq. A grainy five-minute videotape of Berg's horrifying death is the latest and most shocking image to emerge from a strife-torn occupation--one that brings home all too clearly the threat facing every American in Iraq. A 26-year-old self-employed telecommunications expert from suburban Philadelphia, Berg apparently had no connection to the U.S. occupation government, but the exact circumstances of his disappearance remain something of a mystery.
What seems clear is that Berg had the misfortune to run into one of America's most sought-after terrorists. Using sophisticated voice analysis, CIA officials have determined with "high probability" that the man who wielded the knife and later brandished the severed head for the camera is Abu Musab Zarqawi, a feared associate of the al Qaeda terrorist network. Zarqawi's name has been surfacing more and more in connection with a spate of attacks in Iraq, as well as terrorist plots elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe. But he has been something of an enigma for U.S. intelligence officials. Many describe him as an expert in poisons and a master terrorist, with networks extending through more than a half-dozen countries. Zarqawi, says Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, is "the most capable terrorist in Iraq." Skeptics aren't so sure. Some analysts see Zarqawi as a kind of perpetual bogeyman, a convenient foreigner to blame despite little hard proof of his involvement in some attacks attributed to him. They point out that information about Zarqawi is so sketchy that U.S. intelligence officials, who used to believe that Zarqawi had lost a leg in Afghanistan, recently revised that assessment, concluding that he still has both legs.
Any doubts about the threat he poses, though, have been erased by the new video. Before the killing, Zarqawi had a $10 million bounty on his head. U.S. intelligence officials describe him as an associate of al Qaeda who operates independently of, but often in concert with, Osama bin Laden. He also is alleged to be a top operations planner, having been convicted in absentia for the 2002 assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan.
A high school dropout, Zarqawi was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan in 1966. After spending time in a Jordanian jail in the mid-1990s for plotting against the government there, he traveled to Afghanistan. U.S. officials believe that in 2000 bin Laden directed Zarqawi to run two terrorist training camps near Kabul and Herat that offered instruction in chemical attacks. Still in Afghanistan when U.S. forces began their campaign against the Taliban, he reportedly was wounded in a U.S. airstrike, after which he fled to Iraq.
These days, Zarqawi is thought to be running a widening terrorist network in Iraq. "He has become something of a magnet for foreign fighters and terrorists coming into the region," says an intelligence official. U.S. military intelligence has concluded that Zarqawi directed several attacks in Iraq, including two suicide bombings last August against the United Nations headquarters and a prominent Shiite leader. In the Berg video, Zarqawi promises worse to come. "So kill the infidels," he growls, "wherever you see them." -Kevin Whitelaw
This story appears in the May 24, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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