More details about the last moments of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: A dying al-Zarqawi tried to get away.

“The last moments of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” Sorry if it offends anyone, but I do enjoy writing that.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could barely speak, but he struggled and tried to get away from American soldiers as he lay dying on a stretcher in the ruins of his hideout.

The U.S. forces recognized his face, and knew they had the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. Initially, the U.S. military had said al-Zarqawi was killed outright. But Friday new details emerged of his final moments. …

On Wednesday, the U.S. military tracked him to a house northwest of Baghdad, and blew it up with two 500-pound bombs.

Al-Zarqawi somehow managed to survive the impact of the bombs, weapons so powerful they tore a huge crater in the date palm forest where the house was nestled just outside the town of Baqouba. Iraqi police reached the scene first, and found the 39-year-old al-Zarqawi alive.

“He mumbled something, but it was indistinguishable and it was very short,” Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq, said Friday of the Jordanian-born terrorist’s last words.

Iraqi police pulled him from the flattened home and placed him on a makeshift stretcher. U.S. troops arrived, saw that al-Zarqawi was conscious, and tried to provide medical treatment, the spokesman said.

“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 the U.S. military,” Caldwell told Pentagon reporters via videoconference from Baghdad.

Al-Zarqawi “attempted to, sort of, turn away off the stretcher,” he said. “Everybody re-secured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he’d received from this airstrike.”

So much blood covered al-Zarqawi’s body that U.S. forces cleaned him up before taking photographs. “Despite the fact that this person actually had no regard for human life, we were not going to treat him in the same manner,” Caldwell said.