BAGHDAD, 11 December 2003 — Iraqi guerrillas pressed their attacks against US forces yesterday, killing two soldiers and hitting a heavy transport plane landing at Baghdad airport and an Apache helicopter.
A US Air Force C-17 transport plane was forced to return to Baghdad Tuesday after it was hit by a ground-fired missile, according to a senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In Baghdad, military spokeswoman Capt. Carrie Clear said the plane reported an engine explosion on takeoff and that one of the 16 people on board was slightly injured by the blast.
The incident was similar to last month’s targeting of a DHL cargo plane, which was hit while departing the airport.
All passenger flights were suspended after the attack on the DHL flight, dealing a major setback to the coalition’s hopes of normalizing Iraq’s air links with other nations.
In northern Iraq, an Apache helicopter made an emergency landing. A military spokesman said there was no sign of ground fire and the crew was unharmed but the helicopter was burning.
Yesterday’s incidents came one day after the crash-landing of another army helicopter near the western town of Fallujah. Neither of the two crewmen was injured in the incident.
The US military acknowledged that the helicopter was likely brought down by small-arms fire or a projectile fired from the ground.
It was the fifth US helicopter downed in Iraq in just over five weeks.
In the northern city of Mosul, one US soldier died and another was wounded when gunmen fired on troops guarding a gasoline station. US soldiers returned fire and killed one assailant, a military spokesman said.
But witnesses said the attackers escaped and US troops opened fire on passing cars, killing a driver in the line of fire. Witnesses identified the dead passenger as a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a major pro-American political party. The PUK’s Mosul headquarters is across the street from the gas station.
A few hours later, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb and opened fire on a US military convoy in the city, killing another US soldier and wounding three others, the spokesman said.
Residents said other troops on the convoy responded by shooting in the streets, killing a 19-year-old man and injuring his mother and father.
Residents said the family lived close to the site of the ambush, which occurred on a busy road near a US military compound.
Since the US-led invasion on March 20, 450 US soldiers have died in Iraq. Of those, 310 have died as a result of hostile action. The British military has reported 52 deaths; Italy, 17; Spain, eight, and Denmark, Ukraine and Poland one each.
Meanwhile, armed men raided a makeshift Shiite mosque in the Iraqi capital yesterday in an apparent revenge attack a day after a bomb killed four men at a Sunni mosque, witnesses said.
“About 20 men carrying sub-machine guns, anti-tank rockets and grenades emerged from a funeral procession which moved from the Sunni mosque taking the four dead to the cemetery,” said Mohammad Abed, who lives in the building where the mosque is housed. Both mosques are just a few hundred meters apart.
