Two military helicopter crashes killed 10 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and four British crew members in Iraq as both wars heated up. The U.S. helicopter crashed Friday during combat operations aimed at flushing out militants from remote mountains in eastern Afghanistan, military officials said Saturday.
The crash of the CH-47 Chinook was the deadliest for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in a year and comes at a time of increasing militant attacks, though U.S. officials ruled out hostile fire as a cause.
"There is no indication that the helicopter came down due to some enemy action," Lt. Tamara D. Lawrence, a coalition spokeswoman, told the Associated Press.
A purported Taliban spokesman, Mohammed Hanif, called the AP to claim that Taliban militants had shot down the helicopter using a "new weapon" that he refused to specify. The phone call did not come until after news of the crash was made public.
"The Taliban have made those claims before, and they have turned out to be completely false, and there's absolutely no indication that hostile action caused this crash," Lawrence said.
In Iraq, the British helicopter apparently was hit by a missile Saturday and crashed in the southern city of Basra, triggering a confrontation in which jubilant Iraqis pelted British troops with stones, hurled firebombs and shouted slogans in support of a radical Shiite Muslim cleric.
In addition to the four British deaths, Iraqi police said four Iraqi adults and a child were reported killed during the ensuing melee when Shiite gunmen exchanged fire with British soldiers who hurried to the scene. About 30 civilians were injured.
Reminiscent of other outbursts of Iraqis cheering the deaths of foreigners, the chaotic scene was shown on Iraqi state television and on the Al-Jazeera satellite station.
The violence underscored that discontent over the presence of foreign soldiers has been growing among Iraq's majority Shiites even though they have generally steered clear of the Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency.
Afghanistan toll is 234
The U.S. helicopter crashed near the Afghan town of Asadabad, the capital of Kunar province, about 10 miles northwest of a U.S. base and about 150 miles east of the capital Kabul.
The area's only residents are al-Qaida and Taliban militants holed up in makeshift bases where U.S. and Afghan forces are now hunting them down.
"The area of the crash is a mountainous area, and it is difficult to reach," said Gen. Abdul Ghafar, police chief of Kunar province.
Recovery operations did not begin until daybreak Saturday. The military did not say what unit the U.S. troops were from.
About 2,500 Afghan and U.S. soldiers are conducting the joint military operation in Kunar. It's one of the biggest offensives since the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime by U.S.-led forces in late 2001 for hosting al-Qaida.
The 10 deaths bring to at least 25 the number of U.S. military personnel killed in Afghanistan this year and raise the total U.S. death toll to 234 since the U.S. invasion.
Last June, all 16 troops on board a Chinook died in Kunar when it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade - the deadliest militant attack against American forces in Afghanistan.
In September, a Chinook helicopter crashed in a mountainous area in southeastern province of Zabul, killing all five American crew members.
Missile hits Brit chopper
The British helicopter went down in a vacant lot between two houses after it was struck by a shoulder-fired missile, a weapon widely available among insurgent groups and armed militias in Iraq, according to Police Capt. Mushtaq Khazim.
British soldiers with armored vehicles rushed to the scene and were met by a hail of stones from a crowd of at least 250 people, many of them teenagers, who jumped for joy and raised their fists as thick smoke rose from the wreckage.
Three armored vehicles were set on fire, apparently by gasoline bombs and a rocket-propelled grenade, but the troops inside escaped unhurt, witnesses said.
The crowd chanted, "We are all soldiers of al-Sayed," a reference to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an ardent foe of foreign troops in Iraq.
Calm returned by nightfall as Iraqi authorities imposed a curfew and hundreds of Iraqi police and soldiers set up checkpoints and patrolled the streets, residents said.
Sporadic rocket fire could be heard throughout Basra, Iraq's second largest city.
The British Defense Ministry confirmed only that there were "casualties" in the afternoon crash but refused to give a figure or discuss the cause.
A British spokeswoman, Capt. Kelly Goodall, said British soldiers who responded came "under attack by a variety of weapons, including small arms fire, petrol bombs, as well as blast bombs and stone."
She said the soldiers fired "a small number of live rounds" in self-defense. She said there was some minor injuries among the troops on the ground.
Tough time for Blair
In London, Britain's newly appointed defense secretary, Des Browne, said he was "deeply saddened" by the death of British soldiers, "which reminds us of the risks our servicemen and women face every day" in Iraq.
The crash came at a tough time for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who angered many Britons, including members of his own Labor Party, by his support for the war. Friday, Blair carried out a sweeping overhaul of his Cabinet after Labor suffered a drubbing in local elections, drawing calls for the prime minister to set a firm timetable for leaving office.
Tensions have been worsening in southern Iraq, where Britain has about 8,000 soldiers and other countries also have troops.
Three Polish soldiers were wounded by a bomb Saturday in the mostly Shiite city of Diwaniyah. On April 27, a roadside bomb killed three Italian soldiers and one Romanian near Nasiriyah, another Shiite city in the south.
Trouble in the largely Shiite region is due in part to the growing influence of al-Sadr, who led two armed uprisings against U.S.-led forces in 2004 and has been an outspoken critic of the U.S.-led foreign military mission.
Last September, British troops battled Shiite gunmen in Basra after two British undercover soldiers were seized by police, whose ranks have been infiltrated by Shiite militiamen. British forces staged a raid that freed the men.
Tensions boiled again in February when the London newspaper News of the World published video images that appeared to show British soldiers beating Iraqi civilians during a riot in Amarah in 2004.
Shiite anger has also been stoked by a perceived shift in U.S. policy since the arrival of U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, a Sunni Muslim who has criticized the Shiite-led Interior Ministry for human rights abuses and made overtures to Sunni insurgents in hopes of getting them to lay down their arms.
Elsewhere, a suicide bomber wearing an Iraqi army uniform entered an Iraqi base Saturday in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit and detonated an explosives belt, killing three officers, the Defense Ministry said.
The attack appeared to be part of an insurgent campaign to discourage Sunni Arabs from joining the government army and police.
The U.S. command also announced that an American soldier was killed by a roadside bomb Friday in Baghdad. At least 2,417 U.S. military personnel have died since the Iraq War started in March 2003.