Black Hawk helicopter crash kills 14 GIs

BAGHDAD — A U.S. Black Hawk helicopter crash Wednesday killed all 14 troops on board, including the crew, from Fort Lewis, and a powerful truck bomb in north-central Iraq killed at least 51 Iraqis.

It was a day of many reminders of all that is dysfunctional in Iraq and all that is at stake.

With Baghdad suffering through its fifth summer with little more than a couple of hours of electricity each day to run fans and refrigerators, Electricity Minister Waheed Kareem said it probably will be another three or four years before power needs can be fully met.

At least half a dozen roadside bombs detonated near U.S. or Iraqi forces, including one that killed an Iraqi policeman on a platform in a traffic rotary in Tikrit and three that hit passing U.S. convoys in Baghdad. No U.S. military reports were issued on the Baghdad explosions, although witnesses said there appeared to have been casualties in at least two of the blasts.

One U.S. soldier died in western Baghdad during combat operations to clean out cells that support insurgents, the military reported. Sweeps of suspected hide-outs and munitions workshops have been the focus of a troop buildup that has swelled the U.S. military presence in Iraqi to more than 160,000.

The combat death in Baghdad and the 14 fatalities aboard the crashed UH-60 Black Hawk brought to 3,722 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to www.icasualties.org, a Web site that tracks casualties. The Black Hawk went down during night maneuvers in an area of northern Iraq that Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a military spokesman, declined to pinpoint. An investigation was ordered into the cause of the crash.

Bergner said initial indications were that a mechanical malfunction caused the crash. "There were no indications of hostile fire," he told reporters.

Military officials also have yet to determine the cause of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter crash in Anbar province last week in which five U.S. soldiers died, said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, another military spokesman.

The U.S. military relies heavily on helicopters, especially the workhorse Black Hawks, to move troops around Iraq because of the dangers of bombings along Iraq's roads.

Wednesday's crash was the deadliest U.S. aviation mishap here since a CH-53 Sea Stallion went down in a sandstorm in western Iraq on Jan. 26, 2005, killing 31.

The truck bombing outside the main police station in Beiji, a crossroads for Iraq's main oil pipelines located on the Tigris River, leveled the building that had been the town's education administration office until a month ago. Police took it over after their headquarters was bombed by insurgents earlier this year and had planned to erect protective cement walls around it.

Several neighboring buildings also collapsed from the force of the explosion, which inflicted such high casualties because most residents shop in late morning and the station was on the main commercial street.

A suicide bomber drove a motorcycle bearing explosives into a police checkpoint in Muqdadiyah, in Diyala province north of Baghdad. Four policemen and two civilians were killed and 35 people injured, police said.

In Taji, about 25 miles north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated a tank of fuel outside a U.S. patrol base, damaging three houses inside sandbag blast walls and provoking gunfire from within, reported Kamel Luhaibi, a truck driver who witnessed the attack. There was no word on casualties.

Special correspondents in Tikrit and eastern Baghdad contributed to this report.