Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, believed to have been born in Jordan, was possibly of Palestinian descent.
His aliases include Nazzal al-Khalayleh, Fadil al-Khalaylah, Ahmad Fadil Al-Khalailah and just Habib.
Zarqawi went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the late 1980s and came into contact with the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
He also met the al-Qaeda top leader, Osama bin Laden, there.
When Zarqawi returned to Jordan in the early 1990s, he was jailed and spent seven years in jail.
After coming out of the jail, he fled to Pakistan, turned into a fundamentalist and began plotting attacks on US and Israeli targets in Jordan.
His original plan was to overthrow the government of Jordan, but when he was forced to leave the country and sentenced to death in absentia, he went first to Europe then back to the Middle East and South Asia.
He allegedly ran a training centre on the border between Afghanistan and Iran, teaching his students how to use poisons and chemical weapons in terrorist attacks.
After the US invasion of Afghanistan, Zarqawi had to make tracks. According to the then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, that's when the trouble really began.
He was is Iran for a brief period and reached Iraq in early 2002.
In Iraq, he began associating with Ansar al-Islam, an impoverished group of 600 to 800 Iraqi Kurds whose goal was to secede from Saddam's Iraq.
According to the US, Zarqawi used his "base" in Iraq to stage bombings and terrorist attacks in Turkey and Morocco.
Powell told the UN that Zarqawi received medical treatment during a stay in Baghdad in May 2002.
According to US intelligence, Zarqawi had a leg amputated in Baghdad.
But Newsweek wrote in 2004, "The stark fact is that we don’t even know for sure how many legs Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi has, let alone whether the Jordanian terrorist, purportedly tied to al-Qaeda, is really behind the latest outrages in Iraq."
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