Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was at the time the most wanted man in Iraq after trying to ignite a Sunni-Shia civil war in the country. Additionally, he was public enemy number 1 in his native Jordan for bombing 3 Amman hotels. This is the apparent story of how America killed him, from a NY Times piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

This time, McChrystal believed, Zarqawi was in his sights. The tip was long in coming, a result of thousands of hours of intelligence work, but according to several sources, it boiled down to this: Under interrogation, an Iraqi insurgent who was a member of Zarqawi’s inner circle pointed to an Iraqi named Abd al-Rahman, who, the insurgent said, served as Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser. 

Whenever Rahman was preparing to meet Zarqawi, the source told the Americans, he would send his wife and family out of Baghdad the day before. McChrystal and his JSOC team watched Rahman for 17 consecutive days. Then, on June 6, 2006, it happened — Rahman’s family was seen piling into a vehicle and leaving the city. 

The next day, a Predator drone followed Rahman himself as he made his way northeast out of Baghdad, to a small house in a palm grove near the village of Hibhib. Rahman went inside. McChrystal had a commando team on the ground, 18 minutes away. 

As McChrystal and his staff watched through the Predator camera, a man, dressed in black, walked from the house to the edge of the road. The man looked to his right, then to his left. It was Zarqawi. He walked back inside. They were sure it was him. At an operations center, a senior Special Forces commander, realizing that time was short, ordered an airstrike. Two F-16’s were dispatched; one of them was hooked up to a refueling plane; the second jet was told to go alone. A pair of 500-pound bombs killed Zarqawi.