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IRAQ RUMOR: Al-Zarqawi was shot in Ramadi
EFZ: BAGHDAD, Iraq - Insurgents said Wednesday in interviews and Internet statements that the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was struggling with a gunshot wound to the lung, and one of his commanders said al-Zarqawi was receiving oxygen, heightening suspicion that groundwork was being laid for an announcement of al-Zarqawi's replacement or death.
Having trouble breathing, is he? Awwwwwwwwww, too bad.
Insurgents offered no tangible proof for their second day of reports that al-Zarqawi had suffered a potentially fatal wound. The Jordanian-born guerrilla's fighters and one of his top lieutenants have said he was wounded in an ambush by U.S. Marines and Iraqi forces last weekend around the western city of Ramadi. A U.S. military official, Lt. Col. David Lapan, said Wednesday that he had found no record of such an ambush.
The insurgents' accounts suggested at a minimum that steady U.S. and Iraqi military pressure was having an effect on al-Zarqawi's group. In an interview Tuesday, the al-Zarqawi lieutenant, Abu Karrar, described his group as weighing possible foreign or Iraqi successors in case al-Zarqawi died.
One view Wednesday among some Iraqi Sunni Muslim insurgents - sometime rivals and allies of foreign fighters such as al-Zarqawi - was that the attrition among his top supporters may have undercut his support within the insurgency. That view ascribed Tuesday's sudden announcement of his grave injury to a power struggle within his group.
A leader in al-Zarqawi's organization, identifying himself by the battlefield name Abu Jalal Iraqi, said in an interview Wednesday that al-Zarqawi's health "wasn't easy." "He is wounded in his right lung, in which the bullets crossed and remained in his back," Iraqi said.
Slugs stayed in him, along with whatever they carried with them. Excellent chance of infection.

Al-Zarqawi, who is about 39, "is being given respiration," the lieutenant said, without elaborating.
Hard to run dragging an oxygen tank.
Iraqi suggested al-Zarqawi might live to be "a spiritual leader for the group, like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin of Hamas." He referred to the Palestinian cleric who, though partially paralyzed, helped found the Islamic Resistance Movement in the 1980s and remained its spiritual head until his assassination last year.
Death by Hellfire

Later Wednesday, militant Islamic Web sites later gave accounts similar to Iraqi's, down to a description of al-Zarqawi being treated by Sudanese and Saudi doctors. One site posted a denial of the lung injury.
Posted by: Steve 2005-05-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=120099