Two Americans also were killed in separate attacks Thursday and Friday
in the northern city of Mosul, raising concerns that the insurgency was
spreading north.
"Six soldiers were on board and all of them were killed," said Maj.
Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division based in
Tikrit. They were all from the 101st Airborne Division, she said.
It was not immediately clear whether the chopper was brought down by
hostile fire or a mechanical failure, a spokeswoman said. But an officer
who asked not to be identified said it was probably hit by a
rocket-propelled grenade.
White smoke could be seen rising from the crash site as three other
helicopters circled overhead.
Separately, guerrillas attacked a convoy in the eastern part of Mosul,
250 miles north of Baghdad, with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms
fire Friday morning. The military said one U.S. soldier died and six
others were wounded in the clash.
Three others were injured later in the day when a roadside bomb
exploded near the downtown Mosul Hotel, which is now used as a military
barracks, the military said. A military statement released Friday said
that a soldier died the day before near Mosul when a homemade bomb
exploded.
The latest confirmed U.S. military fatalities bring to at least 31 the
number of American troops killed action in the first week of November. Two
American civilian contractors working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
and a Polish officer also died in attacks over the past seven days.
The U.S. military said that the number of daily attacks on coalition
forces dropped to 29 last week from a spike of 37 the week before.
The spate of attacks in the past week in Mosul, Iraq (news
- web
sites)'s third-largest city, has raised concerns among U.S. military
commanders that the insurgency is spreading into that region from its main
stronghold in the so-called Sunni Triangle, to the west and north of
Baghdad.
The city is close to the semiautonomous Kurdish areas that lie between
it and the Turkish border.
In Baghdad, about 500 people marched Friday toward coalition
headquarters to protest the arrest of 36 clerics over the past couple of
months.
They chanted Islamic slogans including "America's army will be wiped
out," and "America is the enemy of God." They also carried a large banner
reading "Prisons ... will never terrify us."
Near Karbala, 70 miles south of Baghdad, the Polish brigade serving as
part of the U.S.-led coalition held a memorial service for Maj. Hieronim
Kupczyk who was killed in an ambush Thursday.
It was the first combat death for Poland, which has 2,400 soldiers in
Iraq and is in charge of a large swath of south-central Iraq where about
9,500 soldiers of several nations help maintain security.
The Pentagon (news
- web
sites), meanwhile, announced that one of the soldiers wounded in
Sunday's downing of an Army Chinook helicopter died Thursday at a medical
facility in Germany, raising the death toll to 16. Twenty-six others were
injured.
In al-Assad, a desert base 155 miles northwest of Baghdad, hundreds of
soldiers, some wearing ceremonial spurs and black regimental hats,
assembled late Thursday to remember their comrades killed in the
shootdown, the deadliest single attack against U.S. forces since the Iraq
war began March 20.
Army officials said the helicopter's crew apparently had a last-second
warning of an approaching missile and managed to launch flares designed to
draw the heat-seeking missile away. The defensive measure did not work and
the missile slammed into the right side of the helicopter's rear engine,
destroying it and triggering a fire.
_____
Associated Press correspondents Slobodan Lekic in Baghdad, Mariam Fam
in Mosul and Katarina Kratovac in Karbala contributed to this report.
