NATO chopper down in Afghanistan, seven soldiers dead
Pastor Dale Morgan
Thursday May 31, 7:00 AM
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NATO chopper down in Afghanistan, seven soldiers dead*
A helicopter carrying NATO-led military in Afghanistan went down late
Wednesday, with seven soldiers "known dead," the force said as the
Taliban claimed to have shot down the chopper.
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) did not refer to the
Taliban claim in a statement that announced the deaths but said the
cause of the crash was being determined by military officials.
"Seven ISAF soldiers are known dead after a Chinook helicopter flying an
ISAF mission went down in Helmand province near Kajaki just after 9:00
pm (1630 GMT)," it said.
The location was the same as that given by the insurgent Taliban
movement, which is confirmed to have brought down only one military
aircraft in Afghanistan.
"The entire crew of five died in the incident. There were also two
military passengers who died," ISAF said in a statement.
The 37-nation ISAF does not release the nationalities of its casualties
until their home nations have done so.
Most of the 5,200 British troops in Afghanistan under ISAF are in Helmand.
A unit that responded to the scene of the crash was ambushed by "enemy
fighters," the statement said. "Under continued fire, the responding
patrol called for an airstrike to eliminate the enemy threat."
An Afghan civilian was injured by gunfire after the crash, it said.
Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said "our Taliban brothers" had shot
down an aircraft, which he said appeared to be a Chinook, in Kajaki in
Helmand.
The twin-engined Chinook transport helicopters can carry up to 30 people
and are in regular use over Afghanistan.
"The helicopter burst into flames in the sky and then crashed. It seems
that no one on board could have survived," Ahmadi said.
"The foreign troops have cordoned the area and are in control of the
crash site so we cannot have access to the area to determine the number
of casualties," he told AFP by telephone.
He said he did not yet know exactly how the aircraft had been brought down.
Taliban fighters have anti-aircraft weapons from the "jihad time," the
period of resistance to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, he told AFP.
Also, "they have received new anti-airplane weapons."
"At this stage I don't have the exact information which weapons they
used to bring down the aircraft," he said.
The insurgent movement has previously claimed to have shot down foreign
military aircraft but this has mostly been rejected by the international
forces which have, however, lost several aircraft to accidents or
technical failures.
In one incident acknowledged to have been caused by Taliban, militants
used a rocket-propelled grenade to shoot down a US Chinook helicopter in
Kunar in June 2005, killing all 16 soldiers on board, eight of them US
Navy SEALs.
It was the first downing of a US helicopter by hostile fire in
Afghanistan and the biggest toll for US forces from a single attack
since the Taliban regime was toppled in a US-led invasion in late 2001.
There have been suspicions that the militants, who are allied with
Al-Qaeda, are trying to acquire shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons for
their fight against the NATO force and the separate US-led coalition.
In March this year, the coalition said it carried out precision air
strikes on Taliban militants who had been helping to move anti-aircraft
weapons in Helmand, killing some of them.
Helmand has seen a surge in military and Taliban activity this year with
hardcore Taliban said to be allied with drugs barons and foreign
fighters in the province, the country's top opium producer.
The latest deaths take to 73 the number of foreign soldiers killed in
Afghanistan this year, most of them in combat.