Fmr. Jordanian Intelligence Official: Americans Have "Blown Zarqawi So Out Of Proportion That, Of Course, His Prestige Has Grown"...

The Atlantic Monthly Mary Anne Weaver June 8, 2006 at 05:33 PM
READ MORE: CIA, Afghanistan

On a cold and blustery evening in December 1989, Huthaifa Azzam, the teenage son of the legendary Jordanian-Palestinian mujahideen leader Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, went to the airport in Peshawar, Pakistan, to welcome a group of young men. All were new recruits, largely from Jordan, and they had come to fight in a fratricidal civil war in neighboring Afghanistan--an outgrowth of the CIA-financed jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet occupation there.

The men were scruffy, Huthaifa mused as he greeted them, and seemed hardly in battle-ready form. Some had just been released from prison; others were professors and sheikhs. None of them would prove worth remembering--except for a relatively short, squat man named Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah.

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