My Life and Times

December 11, 2004CASUALTIES
2 G.I.'s Killed as One Copter Hits a 2nd; Marine and Iraqi Die in AttacksBy ROBERT F. WORTH
AGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 10 - Two American soldiers were killed and four were wounded late Thursday when an airborne helicopter struck one on the ground at an airfield in the northern city of Mosul, military officials said.
A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, said the airborne helicopter, an AH-64 Apache gunship, had hit a UH-60 Black Hawk transport. He added that the cause of the crash was unclear.
Violence continued to flare in the Sunni Triangle, to the north and west of Baghdad. In western Anbar Province, a marine was killed on a security operation, military officials said, without providing details.
In Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, mortar fire struck a car carrying two civilians near an Iraqi National Guard patrol on Friday afternoon, killing one and wounding the other, said Master Sgt. Robert Cowens, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division.
Over the last week, there have been at least four attacks on police station and national guard units in Samarra. American forces drove insurgent forces out of the city or into hiding during a siege in early October, but rebel attacks resumed there a few weeks later and have continued steadily since then.
In Baquba, north of Baghdad, four Iraqi national guardsmen and three civilians were wounded Friday when a roadside bomb exploded near a national guard patrol and insurgents attacked the patrol with small arms afterward, Sergeant Cowens said.
With violence breaking out regularly throughout Iraq, a fuel crisis has worsened in recent days. Gasoline, heating oil and cooking gas are all in short supply, which could further complicate the effort to hold elections as scheduled on Jan. 30.
A chief concern as the elections approach is security, and on Friday, members of a newly formed Shiite militia called the Anger Brigade volunteered to help provide protection at voting stations. The brigade was formed to fight back against Sunni militants who have killed numbers of Shiites in the lawless area south of Baghdad along the Euphrates River.
Using Shiite militia groups for voting security could sharpen the sectarian dimensions of the conflict here, with violent Sunni groups bent on disrupting the election, and it is not clear whether they will be used. Election officials have said regular Iraqi security forces will have primary responsibility for security during the election, but there is a severe shortage of officers.
Also on Friday, the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry announced that two hostages, a Sri Lankan truck driver and a Bangladeshi man, had been released by the militants who kidnapped them in October. Dinesh Rajaratnam of Sri Lanka and Muhammad Farook Abdullah Hadi of Bangladesh are being returned to their home countries, according to a statement on the Web site of the Sri Lankan ministry.
In the devastated city of Falluja, the International Red Cross visited for the first time since the American-led military offensive last month, meeting with Iraqi engineers to discuss the city's sewage and water needs, The Associated Press reported. The Red Cross officials were unable to visit a potato-chip plant where several hundred bodies of insurgents and civilians are apparently being stored.
In Baghdad, Staff Sgt. Johnny M. Horne Jr. pleaded guilty to one count of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the killing of a severely wounded Iraqi teenager in Sadr City, an impoverished Shiite district in northeastern Baghdad, on Aug. 18. He is the first of four soldiers to face court-martial in the case.
Sergeant Horne said he and the other soldiers had discovered the Iraqi in a burning truck, with wounds he had sustained during fierce fighting between American soldiers and rebels loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. At an earlier hearing, a criminal investigator said Sergeant Horne and the soldiers with him had decided to shoot to "put him out of his misery."
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