WASHINGTON, 10 June 2006 — Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was alive and made a move to escape when US troops reached the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, mortally wounded in an American bombing raid, a US general said yesterday.
The attack that killed Zarqawi and his adviser, Sheikh Abdul-Rahman, yielded valuable information for several subsequent raids in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the spokesman for the US military in Baghdad, told Fox News.
“We were not aware yesterday that in fact, Zarqawi was alive when US forces arrived on the site,” Caldwell said.
Iraqi police first reached the bombed safe house in a village north of Baghdad and put Zarqawi on a stretcher, Caldwell said. US ground forces then arrived and identified Zarqawi, who died shortly afterward.
“He was conscious initially, according to the US soldiers who physically saw him. 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 US military,” Caldwell said.
Zarqawi gave up no information before he died, but the attack has yielded unprecedented intelligence about his network, Caldwell said. “We had two of the most prominent figures from the Al-Qaeda network in Iraq here on site in that location... anything they had we now have in coalition forces’ possession and in fact are exploiting it.”
Caldwell said there were 17 raids in Iraq shortly after the attack, some made possible by intelligence gained in it. The intelligence also helped support some of an additional 39 raids on Thursday night.
There were six people in the house at the time of the attack, three women and three men, Caldwell said at a Pentagon briefing later yesterday. There were no survivors, he said.
Zarqawi family sources in Jordan said an infant son of Zarqawi was killed in the US airstrike. The son is from Zarqawi’s second marriage to a Palestinian woman and was born in Syria 18 months ago, said a family source. On Thursday another family source said one of Zarqawi’s three wives was killed in the airstrike.
Iraq’s National Security Adviser Muwaffaq Al-Rubaie said the resources that were allocated to track Zarqawi will now be directed to hunt down his associates. “The plan is to go after secondary targets,” he said. Yesterday, authorities arrested eight Hibhib residents, including Aziz Ali, the owner of the safe house where Zarqawi met his end. During initial questioning, Ali said he thought he was renting the house to a family forcibly displaced by sectarian violence, officials said.
Sympathizers of Zarqawi rushed to swear allegiance to his successor on websites, but there was still little certainty over who that will actually be after the death of the man who masterminded some of the most brutal attacks in Iraq.
Several Web forums were flooded with messages of well-wishers pledging to “hear and obey” the man they claimed was the new “emir” or leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq: Abu Abdul-Rahman Al-Iraqi.
But there was confusion over whether he was still alive. The US military said the airstrike that killed Zarqawi also killed his adviser, a man Gen. Caldwell identified as “Abdul-Rahman” or “Sheikh Abdul-Rahman.” It was not known if “Abdul-Rahman” and “Abu Abdul-Rahman Al-Iraqi” were the same person.
