30 US Troops killed first week in January
A US military Blackhawk helicopter went down near Tal Afar in nothern Iraq, killing all 12 persons aboard. The question is whether they were shot down. The US assaulted the city of Tal Afar in August, emptying the city, leveling neighborhoods with air strikes, and sending in Kurdish and Shiite troops after Sunni Turkmen, their political rivals. A lot of Sunni Turkmen had been Baath Party members and supported the Saddam regime, and enough had serious military experience that they would know how to get hold of a shoulder-fired missile and how to use it (typically they use SA-7s, but on occasion the guerrillas have managed to get more sophisticated SA-14s.) At least one other Blackhawk was shot down this way. Iraqi guerrillas killed five Marines on Saturday and Sunday with small arms fire and roadside bombs. Guerillas in Fallujah killed three of them.
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