Dogs of war

How four-legged heroes like military dog Conan are trained

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spent the final moments of his life running from one of the US Military’s greatest weapons: a vicious Belgian Malinois named Conan.

But dogs like Conan are not born heroes — they have to be finely honed from everyday puppies into fearless four-legged warriors.

And it is no walk in the park.

It all starts at the 341st Training Squadron on the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, where the military’s K-9s have been schooled since the 1960s to take on America’s enemies.

“We treat these dogs like combat athletes. They are a huge mission force multiplier for us,” Major Matthew Kowalski, the commander of the squadron, told The Post during a recent visit to see first-hand what it takes to train a pooch like Conan.

“If we were able to find something that could do their job, a piece of equipment, the government would wholeheartedly most likely buy as many of those pieces of equipment as we could but we haven’t found anything since and probably never will.”

The squadron’s “Guardians of the Night” program prepares the dogs to do everything from detecting deadly explosives to taking down enemies of the state like al-Baghdadi — who ultimately blew himself up rather than face Conan’s snarling wrath as the animal cornered him inside a dead-end tunnel in Syria last month.