BAGHDAD, Iraq – American troops hunted for anti-aircraft missiles along Iraq (news – web sites)’s trucking routes, digging through heaps of manure, mounds of hay or piles of pomegranates Monday. The U.S. Army retrieved the wreckage of a downed transport helicopter and searched for clues about who knocked it from the sky.
Attacks continued Monday — a blast near a Shiite Muslim shrine in the southern city of Karbala that witnesses said killed at least one person, and a barrage of three mortar rounds in Baghdad that caused no reported casualties.
One clue in Sunday’s helicopter shootdown may lie in Ramadi, west of the crash site, where an anti-U.S. leaflet warned, just two days before the shootdown, that Iraq’s insurgents would strike the Americans with “modern and advanced methods.”
The downing of the CH-47 Chinook, one of two carrying dozens of soldiers on their way to Baghdad airport and leave, killed 16 and wounded 20 others. It was the heaviest U.S. death toll in any single action since the invasion of Iraq last March 20.
All but four of the injured were flown by U.S. Air Force C-17 transport Monday to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and treatment at the U.S. military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. Nine were admitted to the intensive care unit, including five in serious condition, said hospital spokeswoman Marie Shaw.
“They are being evaluated and surgeries are planned throughout the day,” she said.
Villagers who saw the helicopter downing south of Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, said it was struck from behind by one or two missiles apparently fired from a date palm grove in the area, deep in the Sunni Muslim heartland that has produced the most violent opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Hundreds of portable, shoulder-fired missiles are unaccounted for in Iraq, potential threats to a U.S. occupation army that relies heavily on the slow, low-flying CH-47 Chinook craft for troop transport. The U.S. command has offered Iraqis $500 apiece for each portable missile turned in but has refused to say how many have been surrendered. In one search operation Monday, U.S. military police stretched out razor wire and set up checkpoints along the main artery running north from Baghdad, now dubbed “Highway 1,” to look for weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles.
“We have had indication that more of stuff like this (missiles) are moving out there,” said Lt. Col. Dave Poirier, commander of the 720th Military Police Battalion. “People know they are taking a big chance in transporting weapons … and for some of these large weapons systems, you’d have to have a truck to transport it.”
Spc. Andrew Fifield of San Antonio, Texas, jumped on top of a truck transporting pomegranates and picked through the fruit carefully.
As he dug through dried manure atop a second truck, he motioned to Iraqi policemen to join him. None did.
“A lot of them were not police as we’d know police back home to be,” Poirier said. “Some of them were never policemen before this.”
The explosion in Karbala, 65 miles south of Baghdad, apparently was caused by a bomb planted in a parked car on a busy street less than 100 yards from the gold-domed Imam Hussein shrine, said Mohammed Abu Jaffar al-Assadi, a Shiite cleric. Other witnesses said it might have been concealed in a bag left outside a hotel.
Besides at least one dead, it was believed 12 people were wounded, al-Assadi said. It was not immediately possible to get confirmation of the report from Iraqi police or the U.S.-led coalition. Karbala has been rocked by deadly clashes between supporters of rival Shiite factions.
Here in the capital, U.S. occupation authorities said three mortar rounds were lobbed from a firing position somewhere in southwestern Baghdad late Monday. Two landed in unspecified locations in central Baghdad, and the third struck a camp of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. It said no injuries were immediately reported.
As a result of Sunday’s shootdown, the U.S. command may have to re-evaluate routes and flying tactics of its transport helicopters and planes over Iraq.
The SA-7 Strela portable missiles known to have been in Iraqi hands, weapons that home in on the engine heat of an aircraft, can be fired to an altitude of 14,000 feet, easily covering the usual cruising altitude of a heavily laden Chinook.
Another shoulder-fired missile in the old Iraqi army’s inventory, the advanced SA-18 Iglas, is equipped with special filters to defeat flares and other countermeasures deployed by U.S. aircraft.
The apparent successful use of such a weapon in Sunday’s attack is a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq’s elusive anti-U.S. resistance, whose attacks have intensified in recent weeks.
The U.S. command in Baghdad said the 82nd Airborne Division, umbrella unit for 12th Aviation Brigade operations in Iraq, was conducting the initial investigation into the downing of the brigade’s Chinook.
At the site Monday, a giant crane lifted pieces of wreckage onto a truck, as soldiers sealed off the immediate area. Villager Jamal Abed, 22, said U.S. troops came to his house Monday morning and told him, through an interpreter, that “if American forces were subjected to fire, they will open fire on every house in the area.”
