November 4, 2003	Tuesday	Ramazan 8, 1424

BAGHDAD: The spectacular downing of a Chinook helicopter near the flashpoint town of Fallujah, which killed 16 American soldiers, sounds the alarm over whether insurgents are now adept at picking off US aircraft.

As American troops struggled to remove the wreckage of the Chinook from an open field west of Baghdad, officials from the US-led coalition were racing to deny the incident was a blow to security and to the US air might.

But facts on the ground show that the ever-spiralling violence in Iraq is becoming deadlier by the day for the Americans, now claiming the lives of a record 16 soldiers in a single strike, and for the first time in the air.

The Chinook disaster is the first time a coalition aircraft has actually been shot down since the April 9 fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, although there have been many previous failed attempts to hit such aircraft.

The strike came just two days after Washington alerted US citizens in Iraq to the threat of missile attacks against civil aviation in the country.

Major Niall Greenwood did not wish to rule out a definite cause for the helicopter’s downing, but said the incident was “described as an attack by anti-aircraft missiles.”

The Saddam regime had spent decades building up one of the region’s strongest military capabilities. Before the launch of the war March 20, arms and military training were made available to the male population.

Amid the collapse of the former regime, arms were left in the trained hands of the armed forces, which have since been angry at being disbanded, as well as with Saddam loyalists and suspected foreign fighters.

Among the weapons available from poorly-guarded arms depots are thousands of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, mostly Russian-made SAM-7s.

“There is a huge amount of ordnance in Iraq, and for sure they (insurgents) are shopping for weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles,” a senior coalition official said.

“We have so far gathered a few hundreds of anti-aircraft missiles, from raids on caches and from people turning them in. But there could be thousands of them out there,” he said.

The official, stressing that people found with missiles would be subject to detention and prosecution, said “people have been handing over anti-aircraft missiles for which we are offering awards of, I think, around 500 dollars.

“I don’t think such single-use missiles cost 5,000 dollars on the market as some reports are saying, but they could cost more than the reward,” he admitted.

Asked if Sunday’s bloody helicopter incident set a precedent for attackers or dealt a significant blow to the coalition, the official said: “I don’t think so, and in any case, in the advent of a threat, we adjust strategies.”

Just a few hours after the downing, US overseer Paul Bremer said Saddam had been “lavish in buying weapons.”

“He had literally thousands of the shoulder-launched Russian surface-to-air missiles in his inventory. We have recovered hundreds of them but there are still thousands of them left,” he said.

Asked about the party behind the helicopter attack, Bremer said: “Certainly the fedayeen killer people left over from the Saddam regime, particularly active in the area around Fallujah, are one suspect.

“Another possibility is international terrorism which unfortunately we have quite a lot of,” he said, warning of a stream of mostly-Arab foreign fighters infiltrating Iraq, mostly from neighbouring Syria.

Such hazards have been the main reason for the delay in the opening of Baghdad airport — said to be fully repaired — to commercial travel. It is currently only used for chartered flights for the coalition, diplomats, aid workers and journalists.

“Clearly, there is more danger to coalition helicopters which fly low and slow, but our planes fly at about 6,500 metres so we are not particularly worried,” said an official from Royal Wing, a subsidiary of Royal Jordanian, that operates the chartered flights.—AFP