U.S. loses fifth copter this month in Iraq

Baghdad - The U.S. military lost its fifth helicopter this month in Iraq, which crashed in the Tigris river while searching for a soldier whose boat had capsized. The aircraft's two crew members and the soldier remained missing Monday.

"We have no news about the progress of the search" or the fate of the missing service members, a military spokeswoman at the central command in Baghdad said Monday.

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 after a river patrol boat overturned in the river a couple of hours earlier.

Two Iraqi policemen and an Iraqi translator accompanying the American soldiers in the boat were confirmed killed in the incident, said the spokeswoman. But one soldier was still missing while three others were safe, she said.

There was no word on the cause of the crash or the capsize, said the spokeswoman, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.S. troops rushing to the scene came under "limited and ineffective small arms fire," she said. An Iraqi policeman manning one of the checkpoints was killed in a drive-by shooting, witnesses said.

Mosul is 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Four other helicopters have crashed in Iraq this month, three of them brought down by enemy fire. The fourth crash, also involving a Kiowa Warrior, occurred Friday near Mosul, but the cause remains unknown.

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

But the 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 al-Husseini 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," said Muwafaq al-Rubaei, a Shiite member of the U.S.-installed Governing Council, after meeting with al-Sistani Sunday.

"The constitution shall be written by Iraqis elected by Iraqis and not by foreigners. Al-Sistani's call is still in place to hold elections," he said.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to announce this week, possibly Monday, whether to send a team to Iraq to assess if early polls are possible as requested by the United States.

Washington hopes that the involvement of the United Nations will help break the deadlock and satisfy the Shiites.

The Bush administration also must deal with claims by David Kay, the outgoing chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

"I don't think they exist," Kay said Sunday on National Public Radio. "The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist — we've got to deal with that difference and understand why."

Kay's remarks reignited criticism from Democrats in the United States.

"You truly should go to war as a matter of last resort," Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry told CBS' "60 Minutes" in an interview to air Sunday night. "I'm afraid the president rushed to war without a plan to win the peace."

On Sunday, U.S. troops arrested nearly 50 people in raids in the Sunni Triangle in central Iraq after attacks in the volatile region killed six American soldiers.

The deaths raised to 513 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the United States and its allies launched the Iraq war March 20. Most of the deaths have occurred in the insurgency by Saddam loyalists since President Bush declared an end to active combat May 1. -- Associated Press

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