ZARQA, Jordan — Abu Ibrahim considers his dead friends the lucky ones.
Four died in Iraq in 2005. Three more died this year, one with an explosives vest and another at the wheel of a bomb-laden truck, according to relatives and community leaders.
Abu Ibrahim, a lanky 24-year-old, was on the same mission when he left this bleak city north of Amman for Iraq last October. But he made it only as far as the border before he was arrested, and he is now back home in a world he thought he had left for good — biding his time, he said, for another chance to hurl himself into martyrdom.
"I am happy for them, but I cry for myself because I couldn't do it yet," said Abu Ibrahim, who uses this name as a nom de guerre. "I want to spread the roots of God on this earth and free the land of occupiers. I don't love anything in this world. What I care about is fighting."
Zarqa has been known as a cradle of Islamic militancy since the beginning of the war in Iraq. It was the home of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgent group al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, who was killed last summer. Today it is a breeding ground for would-be jihadis like Abu Ibrahim and five of his friends who left about the same time last fall, bound for Iraq.
Interviews with Abu Ibrahim and relatives of the other men show that rather than having been individually recruited by an organization like Zarqawi's, they gradually radicalized one another, the more strident leading the way. Local imams led them further toward Iraq, citing verses from the Quran to justify killing civilians. The men watched videos depicting tortured and slain Muslims that are copied from Internet sites.
"Most of the young people here in Zarqa are very religious," an Islamist community leader said. "And when they see the news and what is going on in the Islamic countries, they themselves feel that they have to go to fight jihad. Today, you don't need anyone to tell the young men that they should go to jihad. They themselves want to be martyrs."
Suicide bombings in Iraq are averaging roughly 42 a month, U.S. military officials said.
The anger among militants in Zarqa, a mostly Sunni city, is now directed at Shiites as much as Americans.
"They have traditions that are un-Islamic, and they hate the Sunnis," said Ahmad Khalil Abdelaziz Salah, an imam whose mosque in Zarqa was attended by some of Zarqa's bombers.
Zarqa has been undergoing a shift toward conservative Islam. Some of Zarqa's young men began displaying their commitment to Islam by going to fight in Iraq, and the funerals back home seemed to have had a profound effect on young men.
"It is hard to leave our families," Abu Ibrahim said. "But it is our duty, and if we don't defend our religion who should do it? The old people or the children?"