Baghdad — A mortally wounded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was still alive and mumbling after U.S. air strikes 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.
Also, U.S. troops conducted 39 raids late Thursday and early Friday based on information gleaned from searches in the hours after the al-Qaeda 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.
Mr. al-Zarqawi could barely speak when Iraqi police arrived at the scene of Wednesday's attack.
“He mumbled something, but it was indistinguishable and it was very short,” U.S. military spokesman Major-General William Caldwell said Friday at a news conference.
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U.S. and Polish forces arrived intending to provide medical treatment, and Mr. al-Zarqawi was put on a stretcher. Gen. Caldwell said Mr. al-Zarqawi “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 air strike.
“We did in fact see him alive,” he said. “There was some sort of movement he had on the stretcher, and he did die a short time later.”
Gen. Caldwell said the U.S. military was still compiling details of the attack, including the exact amount of time Mr. al-Zarqawi was alive afterward. He said an initial analysis of the body was carried out but he was not certain it constituted a full autopsy.
In an interview earlier Friday with Fox News, Gen. Caldwell was more descriptive of Mr. al-Zarqawi's actions before he died.
“He was conscious initially, according to the U.S. forces that physically saw him,” Gen. 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.”
At the news conference, he also provided a revised death toll from the attack.
General George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had said on Thursday that four people, including a woman and a child, were killed with Mr. al-Zarqawi and Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, his spiritual consultant.
Gen. 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.
Pentagon officials have refused to say whether U.S. special operations forces participated in the al-Zarqawi operation Wednesday, but a comment Friday by U.S. President George W. Bush suggested that some of the military's most secretive units may have been involved on the ground.
Speaking to reporters, Mr. 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.
Gen. Caldwell said U.S. forces have conducted many raids over the past two days based on intelligence gathered from the scene of Zarqawi's killing.
A targeted individual was killed and at least 25 people were captured, he said. One raid discovered small arms, ammunition and other items hidden beneath the floor of a building in the Baghdad area.
Speaking to the British Broadcasting Corp., the spokesman said troops carried out 39 raids overnight in which troops “picked up things like memory sticks, some hard drives” that would allow U.S. forces to begin dismantling Mr. al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Those raids were based on 17 simultaneous raids U.S. troops staged Wednesday near Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province. The region is in the heartland of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency and has seen a recent rise in sectarian violence. Baqouba is 55 kilometres northeast of Baghdad.
He said the latest information was helping U.S. forces unravel the source of al-Qaeda's weapons and financing.
As Iraqi and U.S. leaders cautioned that Mr. al-Zarqawi's death was not likely to end the insurgency, Gen. Caldwell said another foreign-born militant was poised to take over the terror network's operations.
He said Egyptian-born Abu al-Masri would likely take the reins of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He said Mr. al-Masri trained in Afghanistan and arrived in Iraq in 2002 to establish an al-Qaeda cell.
The U.S. military did not further identify him, and his real identity could not immediately be determined. But the Central Command has listed an Abu Ayyub al-Masri as among its most wanted al-Zarqawi associates and placed a $50,000 bounty on his head.
Mr. al-Masri, whose name is an obvious alias meaning “father of the Egyptian,” is believed to be an expert at constructing roadside bombs.
The midday driving ban in Baghdad lasted four hours. All traffic was banned in Diyala from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. for three days starting Friday.
The Baghdad ban fell when most Iraqis attend Friday prayers. Bombers have previously targeted Shia mosques.
The bans aim “to protect mosques and prayers from any possible terrorist attacks, especially car bombs, in the wake off yesterday's event,” an Iraqi government official said, referring to Mr. al-Zarqawi's death. He insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to media.
