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  Sabha, meanwhile, found himself working more frequently with Zarqawi, and their interactions became increasingly cordial, if not exactly warm.

  One evening, as Sabha was making his rounds, Zarqawi pulled the doctor aside to make a request. It was the first time the man had asked for anything on his own behalf.

  “I think I have high blood sugar,” he began. “My mother has diabetes, so maybe it’s in the family. Can you check?”

  Sabha was happy to oblige, but it was complicated, he said. The test could not be performed in the prison—the risk of infection was too high to draw blood in al-Jafr’s filthy, rodent-infested cells—so Zarqawi would have to be brought to the doctor’s private clinic in the village.

  There was another complication: obtaining the official approvals needed to allow such a dangerous inmate to leave al-Jafr. As expected, the warden protested vigorously. What if it was a ruse to help Zarqawi escape? What if his allies were waiting in ambush in the town? But eventually Ibrahim relented, and arrangements were made for the armed escort that would deliver the prisoner to the village clinic and back again.

  On the day of the test, Sabha decided to wait at the village clinic for his patient to show up. It was well after dark when a convoy of ten vehicles arrived, with a complement of dozens of guards armed with assault rifles. It was the biggest military escort Sabha had ever seen, and he wondered at first if someone from the royal court had decided to call on the village. Instead, a solitary prisoner stumbled out of one of the vans and then disappeared again inside a moving cocoon of armed men.

  Zarqawi was led into the doctor’s office in his prison garb, still wearing his handcuffs.

  “Please take those off,” Sabha ordered, gesturing to the metal bracelets.

  “Sir, the man is dangerous,” one of the escorts protested.

  “You have fifty soldiers watching his every move,” the doctor replied. “I insist that the cuffs be taken off.”

  Having succeeded in freeing Zarqawi’s arms, Sabha proceeded with his examination. He began to roll up one of the prisoner’s shirtsleeves to draw a blood sample, but was stopped again, this time by Zarqawi.

  “I’m sorry,” the inmate apologized. Zarqawi lowered the sleeve back to its position before the doctor had touched it. Then he rolled it back up again, without help. Sabha had tripped on another of Zarqawi’s indecipherable codes on the touching of naked flesh.

  As the blood was being drawn, Sabha worked up the courage to ask, finally, about the nature of the mysterious scar on Zarqawi’s arm.

  “It was a tattoo. An anchor,” he replied.

  “What happened?”

  Zarqawi began to recount how he had gotten the tattoo at age sixteen, at a time when, as he put it, “I wasn’t very Islamic-minded.” After he joined the jihadist movement, his tattoo became an embarrassment. He tried scrubbing it off in various ways, including with bleach. The skin turned an angry red, but the tattoo would not budge.

  Finally, he turned to one of his Zarqa relatives, who was visiting the prison with a razor hidden in his clothes. As Zarqawi sat, the kinsman cut two elliptical lines around the tattoo. He then sliced away the upper layers of skin. When the tattoo was mostly gone, he closed the wound with crude stitches.

  Sabha’s face betrayed his horror at the story, but Zarqawi just shrugged, as though the act of hacking off an offending piece of flesh were as natural as squashing a cockroach. Islam—his brand of Islam—required it. This was an indisputable fact. The rest was a simple act of will.

  “Tattoos,” he explained impassively, “are haram. Forbidden.”

  Sabha finished his exam, and Zarqawi, who showed no signs of physical disease, returned to prison with his escorts. The doctor remained behind to ponder, in his small clinic by the road on the edge of a dead lake, dwarfed by the vastly larger Arabian desert just beyond it.

  Seventy years earlier, an Islamic army had traversed the same road, riding north on horses and camels with the intention of wiping out the country known as Jordan in the name of Allah. These Bedouin raiders, who called themselves Ikhwan, or Brothers, had been armed and trained by Saudi Arabia’s first monarch, Ibn Saud, to help him defeat his political rivals. But the Ikhwan had ambitions beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Bloodthirsty fanatics who regarded all Western inventions and practices as works of the devil, they saw themselves as divinely appointed to purify the region by slaughtering all who allied with foreigners or deviated from their narrow vision of Islam. From the harsh wastelands of the interior, they thundered into the newly formed countries of Jordan and Iraq in the early 1920s with the intention of toppling governments and creating a unified Islamic theocracy, or caliphate, spanning all of the Middle East. They hacked and slashed their way through entire villages that stood in their path, slitting the throats of every male survivor, to ensure that all traces of Western modernity were wiped out.

  Despite vain attempts by the Saudi monarch to control them, an Ikhwan army of about fifteen hundred advanced to within ten miles of Amman, the Jordanian capital, before finally being stopped. British warplanes spotted the approaching column and cut them down with machine guns until all but about a hundred of the raiders were dead.

  Small bands of militants continued to control parts of the Saudi interior at least until the 1950s, menacing and sometimes killing outsiders who wandered near their villages. Eventually they vanished, yet the fierce hatreds that animated the Ikhwan never went away. The unwavering intolerance, the embrace of an extreme and pitilessly violent form of Islam as a kind of cleansing fire—these would find acceptance into the late twentieth century and beyond, from isolated villages in the peninsula’s interior to the oil-rich cities of the Gulf Coast, and from the rugged hills of eastern Afghanistan to the crowded cells of an infamous Jordanian prison.

  At al-Jafr, the contagion was contained within thick prison walls, at least for a time. Under the sentence handed down by the judge in Amman, Zarqawi’s confinement was to continue for another ten years, until 2009, when the muscular and vital young man would be entering middle age. Yet, as Sabha well knew, prison terms in Jordan were rarely what they seemed on paper. A sentence could be drastically shortened because of a change in government, or a perceived need to curry favor with a religious party or tribe. If that happened, Zarqawi could find himself, and perhaps his army of followers, suddenly free.

  2

  “Here was a real leader”

  Two weeks before King Hussein’s death—in the calm before the deathbed farewells, the legions of mourners, and the lines of world leaders paying tribute to Jordan’s greatest and longest-serving statesman—the monarch called his oldest son, Abdullah, to the palace to share a decision that would transform the young man’s life and alter his country’s destiny.

  The king had just returned from a six-month hospital stay in the United States to treat an aggressive form of lymphoma, but the cancer had returned with a fury, and the doctors were warning that his time was short. On January 22, 1999, he phoned Abdullah, then a thirty-six-year-old army commander at the pinnacle of his military career, and asked him to come at once.

  “I want to see you,” he said.

  Abdullah bin Hussein got into his car and drove up the steep road to the palace at Hummar, with its stunning hilltop vistas of the capital city. Inside, he found the king in the dining room, looking alarmingly frail. At sixty-three, he was bone-thin, and his skin was sallow from jaundice. The gray hair and beard that in earlier years had given him a vague resemblance to the actor Sean Connery had long since fallen away, from extensive chemotherapy.

  The king excused his aides and shut the door. He then turned to Abdullah, pale fingers grasping his son’s hands.

  “I want to make you crown prince,” he said.

  The words were all but incomprehensible. For more than three decades, the title had belonged to Prince Hassan, the king’s worldly and accomplished younger brother who had become heir apparent to the throne when Abdullah was still a toddler. The king’s athletic and bo
yish-looking oldest son had spent his adult years driving tanks and helicopters and jumping from airplanes. He had shown little interest in politics or palace intrigues, preferring the military’s cleaner lines of command. Now his father was seeking to propel him into a job whose perils included, among innumerable others, the near certainty of a clash with family members who had been waiting for years for a chance to run the country.

  “What about my uncle?” Abdullah asked at last, according to his recollection of the meeting years afterward.

  But the king had made up his mind. Days later, he would announce his decision publicly in the form of an open letter to Hassan, officially demoting him and hinting vaguely of his disappointment with greedy “climbers” in the royal family who he said were “meddling” and “disloyal.” After his death, he said, the crown would pass from father to son—in this case, to a son who, among the monarch’s brothers, nephews, and eleven children, was distinguished by his lack of ambition to be king.

  Abdullah had been born a crown prince. Under Jordan’s constitution as well as a centuries-old Hashemite dynastic tradition, the title automatically belonged to the oldest male child. But in the turbulent 1960s, with war clouds looming and the monarchy under constant threat of assassination or palace coup, Hussein made his brother the heir apparent, to ensure stability in the case of his death. Removed from the line of succession, Abdullah spent much of his youth and early adulthood outside Jordan. He attended American and British prep schools and universities, which gave him a worldly education but relatively little insight into the inner workings of his own country.

  Back home, he had immersed himself in the culture of Jordan’s lower and middle classes as a career soldier, sharing the same squalid barracks and dust-coated field rations as the other commissioned officers. He climbed the ranks to major general, but he retained his young man’s passion for fast cars and motorcycles. He relished moments when he could personally lead his special-forces teams into operations against terrorists and criminals, as he had famously done the previous year, when his commandos stormed a gangsters’ hideout in a street battle captured live on Jordanian TV.

  But now the young commander sat in the dining room of the Hummar Palace, overwhelmed. With a single sentence, his father had upended his world and the stable, if privileged, life he had built for himself, his wife, and their two children.

  The king also had acknowledged something he had never said aloud: the fact of his impending death.

  “A cold sensation crept into my stomach,” Abdullah would recall. “I think that was the first instant I felt truly alone.”

  He left the palace and returned home to find his wife, Rania, sitting on the floor of their living room with family photos spread out around her. Her eyes filled when he shared the news, as the magnitude of the changes awaiting both of them began to sink in.

  “We would soon be thrust into the spotlight in a way that neither of us could have imagined,” he later wrote in his memoir. “And there were a lot of wolves out there, waiting for us to stumble.”

  Those worries were soon shoved aside by more immediate crises. King Hussein had decided to try one more round of cancer treatment, which meant leaving Jordan for another bone-marrow transplant in the United States. Abdullah would effectively serve as regent during his absence, a role that would force him to plunge headlong into a sea of political and foreign-policy challenges, despite his limited experience. Though he did not yet know it, the list of urgent tasks would soon include preparations for a state funeral and his formal coronation as king.

  On January 29, Abdullah drove his father to the airport to begin his journey to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The king sat in the front passenger seat, looking quietly out the window as the car wound through Amman’s affluent western district, with its high-rise hotels and office towers, and then onto the airport highway. They passed poorer suburbs and villages with their outdoor markets and small, neon-lit mosques. Then they were speeding through open country, past craggy hills and rock-strewn fields where sheep and Bedouin tents compete for space with satellite dishes and Toyota pickup trucks. Abdullah reached over to rest a hand on top of one of his father’s, then kept it there as they rode in silence.

  The farewells were going fine until they reached the airplane, when Abdullah, convinced he was seeing his father for the last time, briefly lost the steely composure he had vowed to maintain. Choking back tears, he helped his father onto the plane and then stood with him for a moment in the aisle to say goodbye. The king looked at his son directly but was clearly struggling with his emotions as well, Abdullah later recalled. Instead of a hug or parting instruction, he simply nodded, then turned to walk down the aisle alone.

  Minutes later, the crown prince was on his way back to Amman and the duties awaiting him at the palace. He would never again see his father conscious. The king returned to the country he had ruled for nearly half a century, but this time there were no cameras on hand as the dying man was wheeled from the plane to a waiting ambulance and onward to Amman’s King Hussein Medical Center, where thousands of ordinary Jordanians stood vigil in a cold rain, refusing to leave until the moment, shortly before noon on February 7, 1999, when television stations throughout the country abruptly went dark.

  Abdullah sat by the hospital bed during the final hours, feeling even more alone for his inability to comfort his father, or to ask for a single word of advice on governing a country that seemed perpetually in crisis, beset by enemies within and without.

  —

  Not since the founding of the country had Jordanians seen an event as grand as the funeral of King Hussein bin Talal. Never had there been such crowds, as ordinary Jordanians—an estimated eight hundred thousand of them, or nearly a quarter of the country’s population—clogged the sidewalks and spilled out of windows and rooftops along the route through which the flag-draped coffin would pass. They stood for hours, bundled up against a damp chill, to honor the only ruler most had ever known: the smiling monarch with the common touch who had led the country through wars and civil strife and then, in his later years, on a historic path to peace. Men and women openly wept, and some wailed and slapped themselves in a traditional Arabic show of mourning. Others ran alongside the funeral cortege and even lunged into its path in a frenzy of grief.

  Nearly as impressive was the gathering of foreign dignitaries at Amman’s Raghadan Palace. Less than twenty-four hours after the king’s death, premiers and potentates from seventy-five countries had passed through the palace’s arched limestone entrance to attend what commentators were already calling “the funeral of the twentieth century.” Four U.S. presidents were among the visitors, including the White House’s current occupant, Bill Clinton, who paused before boarding Air Force One to praise Hussein as a “magnificent man” whose nobility came “not from his title, but from his character.” Britain’s Prince Charles and prime minister Tony Blair rushed to Amman to attend, as did UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and the heads of state of Japan, France, Germany, and the other major European powers. Russian president Boris Yeltsin, looking pale and disoriented, arrived with a phalanx of security guards but left minutes later, complaining of illness.

  The Middle Eastern guests invited the most stares. The contingent included a surprise visitor, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, for years a bitter foe of Hussein, having fought his neighbor across their common border and tried repeatedly to undermine his government. Now the aging autocrat mingled with other emirs and strongmen who at various times had battled the Jordanians, or the Syrians, or each other. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wearing a traditional Hebrew prayer cap over his graying locks, occupied a corner of the domed reception hall with an entourage that included generals, bodyguards, and a bearded rabbi. The Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat, his five-foot-two frame dwarfed by an oversized military coat, made small talk with Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak. Perhaps the most anxious man in the room was Khaled Mashal, the leader of the militant Palest
inian faction Hamas and a repeated target of Israeli assassination attempts. Two years earlier, agents from Israel’s Mossad spy service had jabbed Mashal with a poison needle on an Amman street a few miles from where he now stood. He survived only after a furious King Hussein prevailed on the Israelis to provide his doctors with an antidote.

  Greeting them all, looking slightly uncomfortable in his black suit and red-checkered keffiyeh, was the man whom visitors now addressed as King Abdullah II. The new monarch stood near the coffin in a royal receiving line of siblings and uncles, shaking hands with presidents and ministers who were mostly strangers to him. He was not yet officially king—the formal swearing in would take place before Parliament later in the day—but he had gone on Jordanian television moments after Hussein’s death to signal the change to the nation. When he appeared on camera, reading from a paper script with his father beaming from a portrait over his shoulder, it was the first time most Jordanians had heard his voice.

  “This was God’s judgment and God’s will,” he had said.

  Now he was taking his place at the head of the line of mourners, walking behind his father’s coffin to the royal burial plot, flanked by his uncles and brothers and trailed by the late king’s favorite white stallion, Amr, bearing an empty saddle. At the graveside, next to markers for the first two kings of Jordan, Hussein’s body was removed from the casket and lowered into the ground, covered only by a simple white shroud.

  Then all that remained was the formality of the swearing-in ceremony before the combined houses of Parliament. After administering the constitutional oath, the Senate president introduced the country’s new sovereign.

  “May God protect His Majesty King Abdullah and give him success,” he said.

  It was official, and yet not quite real. As the new king was leaving the ceremony, he was caught off guard when an aide called out, “Your Majesty, this way.”

  “Out of habit, I looked around for my father,” he recalled later.