The American wounded in the New Year’s massacre at an Istanbul nightclub said Monday that he survived the shooting rampage by playing dead — as ISIS took credit for the attack, which took at least 39 lives.
“When he shot me, I didn’t move — I just let him shoot me,” William Jacob Raak, 35, of Greenville, Del., told NBC News, explaining that he was shot in the hip and that the bullet traveled to his knee.
“I was shot when I was already on the ground. He was shooting people that he had already shot.”
Raak, who the US State Department said was the only US citizen confirmed injured in the attack, was celebrating with friends at the hot spot Reina when the gunfire began just 75 minutes into the new year.
He said the shooter, who was still at large Monday, walked on a bench he was hiding under.
“I saw him coming, and he shot us all. Somebody said there were shots fired, and I initially did not believe it until I saw the gunman and he started shooting up the whole place,” he told NBC.
Seven of his friends were also wounded. All were expected to survive.
The ISIS-linked Aamaq News Agency, meanwhile, praised the gunman as a “heroic soldier of the caliphate who attacked the most famous nightclub where Christians were celebrating their pagan feast.”
The terrorist, the agency said, used an AK-47 automatic rifle in “revenge for God’s religion and in response to the orders” from ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Baghdadi has taken credit for terror attacks in Brussels and Paris. The US has placed a $25 million bounty on his head.
He also inspired the gunman who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in June and the couple that gunned down 14 people at a center in San Bernardino, Calif., in December 2015.
The Istanbul killer blasted his way into the upscale club — fatally shooting a cop and another man out front — before opening fire on the nearly 600 people welcoming the new year inside.
Despite the chaos around him, Raak, one of 69 people wounded in the onslaught, said that even after he was shot, he kept silent and tried to stay still so the gunman would think he was dead.
“You just have to stay as calm as you can,” he said. “I took a bullet.”
Raak said a second bullet ricocheted off his cellphone.
“I was probably the luckiest person in the whole thing,” he said.
Turkish officials said they have the gunman’s fingerprints and were confident they would soon track him down. They said he was likely from either Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan.
“There is strong coordination, and we will find him, no delay,” Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said outside an Istanbul hospital, where he was visiting the injured, according to CNN.
After shooting the cop and the man outside, the gunman barged into the packed club and started indiscriminately firing with his military-style assault rifle, killing mostly foreigners from the Middle East. The club is near the Bosphorus attracts wealthy tourists and local celebrities.
He went through six magazines of ammo, firing more than 180 bullets in the minutes-long assault, Turkish investigators said.
Police were investigating whether the attack was engineered by the same ISIS cell responsible for the suicide bomb and gun attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport in June, the Hurriyet and Karar newspapers reported.
Citing officials at the Turkish Justice Ministry, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported that 38 of the 39 dead were identified and that 11 were Turkish nationals and one held dual Turkish-Belgian citizenship.
The shooting followed more than 30 violent acts over the past year in Turkey, a NATO ally and a member of the US-led coalition battling ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
Turkey’s attacks on Islamic terrorists in Syria continued on Monday, with more than 100 ISIS targets hit by Turkey and Russia in separate operations.
For some analysts, ISIS’s claim of responsibility signaled a shift in the Islamist group’s strategy in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim nation.
“It’s a new phase,” said security analyst Michael Horowitz. “What we saw before was an undeclared war, and now we’re entering an open war.”
With Post Wire Services