Re: Search for 3 Missing GIs Goes On

Date: January 26, 2004

"U.S. Troops Search for Missing in Iraq Crash

By Vijay Joshi The Associated Press
and © 2002 The Moscow Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. forces aided by Iraqis searched the muddy waters of the Tigris River on Monday in northern Iraq for a soldier and two pilots missing after a helicopter crashed while searching for a river patrol boat that had capsized.

Two Iraqi policemen and an Iraqi translator accompanying the U.S. soldiers in the patrol boat were killed in the incident, said a military spokeswoman. But one soldier was still missing while three others survived, she said.

The OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter, attached to the 101st Airborne Division, crashed in the Tigris in the northern town of Mosul on Sunday evening during a search-and-rescue mission a little more than an hours later, and both crew members were missing. The U.S. military said in a statement that both crashes "were not the result of enemy action" according to initial indications.

"Search efforts are still under way for the three soldiers utilizing all available assets" with the help of Iraqi police and fire departments, said the statement received Monday.

Separately, a man was killed when he stepped on a roadside bomb as he got off a bus in a Baghdad suburb on Monday, Iraqi Civil Defense Corps Second Lieutenant Mustafa Tariq said. The explosion destroyed the bus, injuring three passengers including one critically, he said.

In other violence, four Iraqi policemen manning a checkpoint outside Ramadi west of Baghdad were killed Sunday in a drive-by shooting, police Lieutenant Colonel Saad Someir said. He said gunmen killed three policemen at another checkpoint in Ramadi, also Sunday.

The Kiowa Warrior was the fifth U.S. helicopter to crash in Iraq this month. Three others were brought down by enemy fire and a fourth, also a Kiowa Warrior, crashed Friday south of Mosul soon after takeoff, killing both pilots. The reason was not clear.

The three missing service members were with the 101st Airborne Division, according to the statement.

The News Tribune of Tacoma newspaper, which has a reporter embedded with the division, said the helicopter went down on the east bank of the Tigris just across from the populous old part of Mosul, 360 kilometers northwest of Baghdad. When rescuers reached the helicopter, they found no one aboard, the Washington-based newspaper said, quoting unidentified officials.

Witnesses said a U.S. patrol came under rocket-propelled grenade fire in Mosul on Monday but there were no casualties.

The crashes add to the mounting losses for U.S. forces as the U.S.-led civil administration prepares to hand over power to a sovereign Iraqi government on July 1.

That plan -- which envisages a non-elected government to take over after regional caucuses -- has run into stiff opposition from a powerful Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani, who wants direct elections.

U.S. officials say the continuing violence and the absence of an electoral roll or a census make it impossible to hold early elections. However, the United States cannot afford to offend the Shiite leadership, because Shiites are estimated to comprise about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people.

"The clerics' opinion is the opinion of the Iraqi people in general," Muwafaq al-Rubaei, a Shiite member of the U.S.-installed Governing Council, said Sunday after meeting with al-Sistani."