BAGHDAD, 3 November 2003 — In the deadliest attack on US forces since they launched their war on Saddam Hussein, 15 soldiers were killed and 21 wounded yesterday when a US military helicopter was downed outside the flashpoint town of Fallujah.
As insurgents made good on threats to turn the weekend into a bloodbath for the Americans, the military reported the death of another US soldier in a roadside bomb attack in Baghdad.
And in Fallujah, a roadside bomb blast killed two US civilian contractors working for the US Army Corps of Engineers and wounded another. After the blast jubilant Iraqis danced on the flaming wreckage of the contractors’ vehicles.
The crippled Chinook helicopter came down in farmland at 9 a.m. near the village of Baisa, south of Fallujah, a fiercely anti-US town 50 km (30 miles) west of the capital.
“Currently 15 soldiers are KIA (killed in action) and some 21 wounded,” a US Army spokesman said. US helicopters circled above the smoking wreckage. Other helicopters and US Humvee vehicles were parked nearby.
Some Iraqis were jubilant. “The Americans are pigs. We will hold a celebration because this helicopter went down — a big celebration,” said wheat farmer Saadoun Jaralla near the crash site. “The Americans are enemies of mankind.”
It was the third time guerrillas had brought down a US helicopter since US President George W. Bush declared major combat over in Iraq on May 1.
“Clearly it is a tragic day for Americans,” US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told ABC television. “In a long hard war we are going to have tragic days.”
A US spokesman said two Chinooks had been heading for Baghdad airport with troops on a rest and recreation break when one of them was “shot down by an unknown weapon.” A witness in Fallujah, Dawoud Suleiman, said: “There were two American helicopters. They fired a missile at one and missed, and then they hit the other, which crashed and caught fire.”
“We’ve known about surface-to-air missiles since before we went in,” Rumsfeld said. “They are dangerous and they exist in that country in large numbers.”
Hundreds of the portable missiles, mainly Russian-made SAM-7s, are said to be scattered around the country, available to insurgents from poorly guarded arms depots that are a legacy of Saddam’s regime.
Soldiers sealed off the crash site, which was littered with smoldering wreckage. Villagers around the site appeared cowed by the heavy military presence, but in an indication no love is lost between the soldiers and the Iraqis, a farmer said quietly: “If only one soldier is killed, we are happy.”
Only the 28 Americans killed on March 23, third day of the war, surpassed yesterday’s daily death toll. The Baghdad command said a search was under way at the site for possible other survivors.
The helicopter was part of a formation of two Chinooks carrying more than 50 passengers to the US base at the former Saddam International Airport, renamed Baghdad International Airport. “Our initial report is that they were being transported to BIA for R&R flights,” that is, rest and recreation leaves abroad, a US command spokeswoman in Baghdad said.
Before the helicopter attack, 123 US soldiers had died in hostilities in Iraq in the past six months, including one killed by an overnight roadside bomb blast in Baghdad and two killed by a bomb in the northern city of Mosul the day before. Rocket and bomb attacks have killed 12 US soldiers in an eight-day upswing in violence that began when guerrillas rocketed a Baghdad hotel where US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying last Sunday.
The next day four suicide attacks killed 35 people at the International Committee of the Red Cross office and three police stations, prompting the United Nations, the ICRC and other aid agencies to pull more foreign staff from Baghdad and review their operations, in a fresh blow to reconstruction efforts.
Rumsfeld said the United States had no hard evidence that Saddam was coordinating the recent deadly attacks. “The fact that he’s not been captured or killed is important,” Rumsfeld said.
US overseer Paul Bremer vowed the US-led coalition would press on with its efforts to rebuild Iraq despite the strikes. “We are not going to be deterred,” Bremer told CNN.
“The enemies of freedom in this country will stop at nothing, and now this week which started with the killings of lots of Iraqis ended with the killing of Americans,” he said.
“Now we’ve mingled together in this war against terrorism, and... we are not going to be deterred until we win the war and we are going to win it here in Iraq,” he pledged. — Additional input from agencies
