BAGHDAD, Iraq – The U.S. command has ordered changes in flight operations after four helicopters were shot down in the last two weeks, the chief military spokesman said Sunday, acknowledging for the first time that the aircraft were lost to hostile fire.
The crashes, which began Jan. 20, follow insurgent claims that they have received new stocks of antiaircraft weapons – and a recent boast by Sunni militants that “God has granted new ways” to threaten U.S. aircraft.
All four helicopters were shot down during a recent increase in violence, which an Interior Ministry official said has claimed nearly 1,000 lives in the past week alone. At least 103 people were killed or found dead Sunday, most of them in Baghdad, police reported.
Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told reporters that the investigations into the crashes of three Army and one private helicopters were incomplete but “it does appear they were all the result of some kind of anti-Iraqi ground fire that did bring those helicopters down.”
It was the first time a senior figure in the U.S. Iraq command had said publicly that all four helicopters were shot down.
“Based on what we have seen, we’re already making adjustments in our tactics and techniques and procedures as to how we employ our helicopters,” Caldwell said. Caldwell did not elaborate, presumably for security reasons.
The Iraqi government on Sunday accused Syria of harboring insurgents fomenting violence in Iraq following a massive suicide bombing the previous day that killed at least 130 people.
“I confirm that 50 percent of murders and bombings are by Arab extremists coming from Syria,” said Iraqi government spokesman Ali Dabbagh. “They come from Syria, and we have evidence to prove it.”
No such evidence was presented, however, at the session with reporters.
Lt. Gen. Abboud Gambar, who will lead Iraqi forces in the coming security crackdown in Baghdad, takes charge today, and the much-vaunted joint operation with American forces to curb sectarian bloodshed will start “very soon thereafter,” a senior U.S. military adviser said.
Gambar, a Shiite in his early 60s, was held briefly as a U.S. prisoner after his capture in the 1991 Gulf War. He and his unit were decorated by Saddam Hussein for their defense of Kuwait’s Fialaka Island at the opening of the conflict, which ended in Iraq’s defeat after a year of occupying its smaller neighbor.
“The end of the summer is where we should be able to see … the fruits of our labor and this stability that we’re talking about,” said Col. Douglass Heckman, the senior adviser to the 9th Iraqi Army Division.
American and Iraqi commanders are pulling together a force of about 90,000 troops, for what many see as a last-chance drive to curb sectarian violence.
U.S. military death
The latest identification reported by the U.S. military of a soldier recently killed in Iraq:
Army Sgt. Maj. Michael C. Mettille, 44, West St. Paul, Minn., died Thursday at Camp Adder from a noncombat related injury; assigned to the 134th Brigade Support Battalion, Brooklyn Park, Minn.
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