World

2 GIs Die In Iraq Chopper Crash

February 26, 2004 / 2:10 PM EST / CBS/AP

Americans and their Iraqi allies were the targets of fresh violence Wednesday as a question mark hung over the political future of the country.

A U.S. military OH-58 Kiowa helicopter crashed into a river west of Baghdad, the military said, killing two servicemembers. A witness reported seeing a missile hit the aircraft.

It brought the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq to 547. With the crash, the U.S. military has lost 15 helicopters since the occupation began in May most to hostile fire. At least 60 Americans have been killed in the crashes.

Elsewhere, gunmen assassinated the deputy police chief in the northern city of Mosul on Wednesday, and militants warned of further attacks on Iraqi security forces and Kurdish militiamen, accusing them of protecting "infidel" Americans.

And in Baghdad, attackers fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a major Shiite Muslim shrine overnight, officials at the shrine said. The RPG punched a hole in an outer wall of the Kazimiyah shrine in a northern neighborhood of the capital, but caused no injuries.

In other developments:

British prosecutors dropped their case against a former intelligence employee who leaked a confidential memo from U.S. intelligence officers asking their British counterparts to spy on members of the U.N. Security Council before the Iraq war.

CIA Director George Tenet on Tuesday told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the United States is making strides against the Iraqi insurgency, but elements of former President Saddam Hussein's government and foreign fighters pose serious threats to stability and U.S. forces. He said the Iraq Survey Group must continue to look for hidden weapons.

A Kurdish group, the Reform Movement of Kurdistan, announced it had gathered 1.7 million signatures on a petition demanding a referendum in the Kurdish areas on whether they should remain part of Iraq or gain independence.

A number of mainly Shiite southern towns have raised objections to local leaders installed by U.S administrators. About 2,000 people demonstrated outside Hillah's city hall, protesting Wednesday's election of a new governor by a coalition-appointed provincial. A similar dispute has arisen in the nearby city of Karbala.

The United Nations is confident a broad spectrum of Iraqis agrees that elections are impossible before the June 30 transfer of sovereignty to a caretaker government, a top U.N. envoy said.

Lakhdar Brahimi, who authored a U.N. report on Iraq released this week, said his fact-finding team met with between 400 and 600 Iraqis during its mission, and he felt no strong opposition to delaying elections until late this year or early next year.

"The impression we had was that we very conclusively demonstrated to them that no credible elections are really possible before the 30th of June," Brahimi told reporters at the Japan National Press Club. "The impression we had was that all our interlocutors — and there were hundreds of them — agreed with us."

The U.N. report released on Monday recommended the establishment of an interim government to assume sovereignty, but warned it would take at least eight months to properly prepare for elections.

That conclusion has frustrated leaders of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, who had been leading the campaign for an early vote. It also left open the question of how a provisional government will be created.

But rather than breaking the impasse over how to form a new government, the much-awaited U.N. report has simply told the Iraqis it's up to them to determine how to form an administration to take power from the Americans on June 30.

That opens the door to protracted deliberations within an Iraqi leadership which has shown little sign of cohesion and whose members are seeking to position themselves for power in the new Iraq.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials have said insurgents seek to fan tensions between Iraq's Shiite majority and Sunni minority into a civil war. At the same time, guerrillas have stepped up attacks on Iraqi police and security forces, which are due to take a front-line role against the insurgency one the Americans transfer power to the Iraqis on June 30.

The attack on the shrine came on the fourth day of the Islamic month of Muharram, a sacred period when thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Iranian pilgrims have converged on Kazimiyah, where two Shiite saints are buried, and other Shiite shrines in cities of southern Iraq.

Gunmen in a car opened fire on Mosul's deputy police chief Brigadier Hikmat Mohammed as he was headed to his office Wednesday morning, killing him, police Lt. Ziad Mahmoud said.

Hours earlier, a previously unknown militant group, the Mujahedeen Brigades in Iraq, distributed leaflets at police stations in the northern city of Kirkuk, threatening attacks on police and Kurdish militias for cooperating with Americans.

Police Col. Adel Ibrahim said he believed the group may have been behind the attack Monday in which a suicide bomber detonated his explosive-laden car outside Kirkuk's Rahimawa police station, killing himself and eight policemen and wounding more than 50 other people.

"Anyone who supports and cooperated with the infidels will be under threat of death," the group said. It threatened attacks on police checkpoints and warned, "We know all these (security) forces' movements."

Kirkuk police chief Sherko Skakir said passengers in a single car distributed the leaflets overnight, throwing them over the walls of about two thirds of the police compounds in the city, 180 miles north of Baghdad.

Police discovered a car packed with explosives Tuesday afternoon on a main road in Kirkuk used by American patrols. The bomb was defused, police said.

Elsewhere, a roadside bomb exploded Wednesday alongside a convoy of fuel tankers near Latafiyah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, witnesses said. A Saudi fuel truck was damaged and the driver injured, the witnesses said.

Also Wednesday, leaflets were found pasted on a mosque in the central city of Fallujah warning police that those "collaborating with the Americans against the mujahedeen will be attacked."