Al-Zarqawi tried to flee in dying moments

updated 5:53 a.m. ET June 10, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A mortally wounded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was still alive and mumbling after American airstrikes on his hideout and tried to get off a stretcher when he became aware of U.S. troops at the scene, a top military official said Friday.

Meanwhile, U.S. troops conducted 39 raids late Thursday and early Friday, some based on information gleaned from searches in the hours after the al-Qaida leader’s death. Fearing that insurgents will seek revenge, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki imposed driving bans in Baghdad and restive Diyala province, where the terrorist was killed.

Maj. Gen. Bill Caldwell, speaking to reporters at the Pentagon from his post in Baghdad, said al-Zarqawi was alive when Iraqi police first arrived on the scene but he died soon after.

“We did in fact see him alive,” Caldwell said. “He mumbled a little something but it was indistinguishable and it was very short.”

U.S. and Polish forces arrived intending to provide unspecified medical treatment, and al-Zarqawi was put on a stretcher, Caldwell said.

The terrorist “attempted to sort of turn away off the stretcher, everybody reached to insert him back. ... He died a short time later from the wounds suffered during the airstrike.

Wounded, tried to flee U.S.
Caldwell said the U.S. military was still compiling details of the airstrike, including the exact amount of time Zarqawi was alive afterward. He said an initial analysis of Zarqawi’s body was done but he was not certain it constituted a full autopsy.

In an interview earlier Friday with Fox News, Caldwell was more descriptive of Zarqawi’s actions before he died.

“He was conscious initially, according to the U.S. forces that physically saw him,” Caldwell told Fox. “He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realizing it was U.S. military.”

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At the news conference, the spokesman also provided a revised death toll from the attack.

Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had said four people, including a woman and a child, were killed with al-Zarqawi and Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, the terrorist’s spiritual consultant.

Youth not among dead
Caldwell said it now appears there was no child among those killed. He cautioned that some facts were still being sorted out but said that three women and three men, including al-Zarqawi, were killed.

Pentagon officials have refused to say whether U.S. special operations forces participated in the al-Zarqawi operation Wednesday, but a comment Friday by President Bush suggested that some of the military’s most secretive units may have been involved on the ground.

Speaking to reporters, Bush mentioned that among the senior officers he called to offer congratulations for killing Zarqawi was Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of Joint Special Operations Command, whose forces include the Army’s clandestine counterterrorism unit, Delta Force.

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