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U.S. Helicopter Goes Down Near Tikrit
By KATARINA KRATOVAC, Associated
Press Writer
TIKRIT, Iraq - A U.S. Army Black Hawk
helicopter was shot down Saturday by ground fire near Tikrit, a center of
Iraq (news
- web
sites)'s anti-U.S. insurgency, U.S. officials said. The U.S. command
in Baghdad said five soldiers were injured.
Two helicopters were flying when the second one in the formation was
hit by a projectile, believed to be a rocket propelled grenade, witnesses
said. An AP reporter at a U.S. base several hundred yards away saw the
striken aircraft spin out of control in the air then fall to the ground.
The downed craft could later be seen, engulfed in flames and lying amid
brush in a field as a plume of thick black smoke rose into the sky. The
second copter hovered overhead.
It was the second time a U.S. helicopter has been downed by hostile
fire since President Bush (news
- web
sites) declared an end to major combat in Iraq on May 1. The last
copter to be shot down was in June.
"A helicopter did go down," Capt. Jefferson Wolfe, a spokesman for the
4th Infantry Division, said. "We can confirm it. It was a Black Hawk. We
are investigating."
In Baghdad, the U.S. military command said the five people on board
were injured but were "safely evacuated." The command did not say why the
helicopter went down but added that after it crashed it received ground
fire.
An injured person was seen being removed from the site on a stretcher.
Black Hawks ordinarily have a crew of three and can carry an additional 11
passengers.
The downing came at a time when U.S. officials have been warning that
thousands of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles remain unaccounted for
after the fall of Saddam Hussein (news
- web
sites)'s regime and pose a threat to U.S. military aircraft. RPGs,
also fired with a shoulder device, are a weapon frequently used by
insurgents for ambushes on American forces.
Tikrit, the hometown of ousted leader Saddam Hussein, lies in the heart
of the "Sunni Triangle," the region of central Iraq north of Baghdad that
has seen mutliple attacks every day against U.S. forces. The region is
where Saddam drew his strongest support, and his loyalists are now
believed to be leading resistance to the U.S.-led occupation.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, on a three-day tour of
Iraq, was in Tikrit earlier Saturday visiting the main U.S. garrison
there. He left the city hours before the helicopter was shot down and was
in the northern city of Kirkuk, U.S. officials said.
On June 12, a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter was shot down by
hostile fire in western Iraq. The craft's two crewmembers were rescued
unhurt.
In May, two helicopters were involved in fatal accidental crashes. On
May 20, four U.S. Marines on a resupply mission were killed when their
Ch-46 Sea-Knight transport helicopter crashed into the Shat al-Hillah
Canal in Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad. A fifth Marine drowned
trying to save them.
On May 9, three American soldiers were killed and a fourth injured when
their Black Hawk helicopter crashed in the Tigris River not far from the
northern city of Tikrit during the rescue of an Iraqi child wounded in an
explosion.
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