World

U.S. Copter Downed In Iraq

April 5, 2007 / 12:50 PM EDT / CBS/AP

A U.S. helicopter went down after coming under fire Thursday in a Sunni militant stronghold south of Baghdad. There were no deaths, but four of the nine aboard were wounded, the U.S. military said.

Gunmen opened fire on the Black Hawk helicopter at about 7:30 a.m. as it flew over Latifiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, an Iraqi army official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Latifiyah, part of the area known as the Triangle of Death, is a stronghold of the Sunni-based insurgency, reports CBS News' Pete Gow.

The U.S. military, meanwhile, has confirmed the deaths of four more soldiers in Iraq, reports Gow, while four British soldiers, along with a Kuwaiti interpreter, were killed by a roadside bomb near Basrah early Thursday morning.

In other developments:

A car bomb struck a Sunni Muslim television station in Baghdad's western neighborhood of Jami'a on Thursday, wounding at least six guards, a spokesman for the political party that owns the station said. Shortly after the explosion, the station went off the air, although a photo of a mosque with readings from the Quran, the Muslim holy book, appeared for a brief time.

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Wednesday fired two senior members of his movement after they met with the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, a lawmaker close to the anti-American cleric said. The two were having dinner at the home of a former prime minister Monday when Gen. David Petraeus arrived, and failed to leave the room when the American walked in.

A bomb struck an oil pipeline Thursday, cutting off supplies and causing a huge fire in southern Iraq near the border with Kuwait, an official said. The pipeline carries oil from surrounding fields to storage tanks in Basra for export to the Gulf region, according to the official with the South Oil Co. But he said the tanks were full and export supplies had not yet been affected.

The U.S. helicopter went down in a rural area and U.S. forces had cordoned off the site, the Iraqi army official said. He said the militants apparently were using an anti-aircraft heavy machine gun.

The last helicopter incident in Iraq occurred on March 1, when an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter made a "hard landing" in northern Iraq leaving the two crew members wounded. A week earlier, ground fire forced the downing of a Black Hawk north of Baghdad.

With Thursday's incident, at least nine U.S. helicopters have crashed or been brought down by hostile fire this year in Iraq.

Of the four U.S. soldiers whose deaths were confirmed Thursday, two were killed when their patrol was hit by an IED in Baghdad Wednesday, reports Gow. Three more service personnel were injured in the same incident.

The military added that members of the unit have found three weapons caches and detained three suspected militants over the past week during targeted raids in the area as part of a 7-week-old security crackdown.

Two more soldiers were killed by small-arms fire in two separate attacks in the capital on Tuesday. They were identified as Army Pfc. Gabriel J. Figueroa, 20, of Baldwin Park, Calif., and Staff Sgt. Shane R. Becker, 35, of Helena, Montana.

The British incident was the biggest loss of life for British forces since Nov. 12, when four were killed in an attack on a Multi-National Forces boat patrol on the Shatt Al-Arab waterway in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city.

Thursday's deaths raised to 140 the number of British forces to die in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion and to 109 the number killed in combat.

Iraqi police officials in Basra said the British patrol had earlier detained 1st Lt. Haidar al-Jazaeri of the Interior Ministry's Major Crimes unit, and were on their way back when they hit the roadside bomb. Gunmen then opened fire from three directions, causing more casualties, the officials said without providing a breakdown.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has announced that Britain will withdraw about 1,600 troops from Iraq over the next few months and hopes to make other cuts to its 7,100-strong contingent by late summer.