Zarqawi Did Not Die Instantly, U.S. General Says

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Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who led an al-Qaeda-affiliated group in Iraq, initially survived an airstrike that targeted his hideout north of Baghdad Wednesday, then died on a stretcher as U.S. troops prepared to give him medical assistance, a U.S. general said today.
Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, a top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said Zarqawi tried to roll off the stretcher and had to be restrained, mumbling something unintelligible, before he died of wounds received when a U.S. Air Force F-16 dropped two 500-pound bombs on his safe house late Wednesday. Initial reports were that Zarqawi died instantly in the bombing, which Caldwell said killed five other people, including three women.
Iraq's new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, vowed to "build on the additional momentum gained from the death" of Zarqawi to defeat terrorism and the sectarian violence that the Jordanian fomented between the country's newly empowered Shiite Muslim majority and disaffected Sunni Muslim Arabs who form the bulk of the insurgency.
President Bush cautioned that while Zarqawi's demise deals "a major blow" to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, "it's not going to end the war" in Iraq. "But it's going to help a lot," he said.
Zarqawi's supporters, meanwhile, swore allegiance today on Islamic militant Web sites to his presumed successor, a man calling himself Abu Abdul Rahman al-Iraqi, the "deputy emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq," as Zarqawi's group is known. Little information about the deputy is available, but his pseudonym indicates that he is an Iraqi.
In an op-ed piece published in today's Washington Post, Maliki said his government would capitalize on the death of Zarqawi to "kickstart extensive reconstruction," promote "genuine national reconciliation" and intensify the development of the national military and police. He said his newly completed cabinet would launch initiatives to "secure the capital and confront the ethnic cleansing" taking place around it, strengthen the government's intelligence services, disband armed militias and "fight corruption from the top down."
Speaking to reporters at Camp David, Md., where he is hosting the visiting prime minister of Denmark, Bush said he was "thrilled that Zarqawi was brought to justice" and considers that development "a big deal." He explained his initial muted response to the airstrike by saying, "I don't want the American people to think that a war is won with the death of one person."
Bush added, "I am confident that al-Qaeda will try to regroup and kill other people" to demonstrate its resolve.
"Zarqawi, in fact, did survive the airstrike," Caldwell told Pentagon reporters this morning in a teleconference news briefing from Baghdad.
"The first people on the scene were the Iraqi police," he said. "They had found him and put him into some kind of gurney/stretcher kind of thing, and then American coalition forces arrived immediately thereafter on-site. They immediately went to the person in the stretcher, were able to start identifying by some distinguishing marks on his body. They had some kind of visual facial recognition."
Citing a briefing he received during a visit to the area today, Caldwell said, "Zarqawi attempted to, sort of, turn away off the stretcher. Everybody resecured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he'd received from this airstrike."
He did not characterize Zarqawi's action as an attempt to escape, but as "some kind of movement he had on the stretcher."

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