The United States military said Saturday that an airstrike north of Baghdad had killed several insurgents with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who were using heavy artillery and machine guns to fire at American helicopters. The strike occurred Friday west of Taji, where several American helicopters were shot down in recent weeks, and the American assault destroyed at least two pickup trucks with mounted machine guns, said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad. He said the strike did not appear to eliminate the threat to American aircraft because other weapons had been used against helicopters in Falluja and other parts of the country. “We have seen other systems,” he said. “When the other helicopters were shot down, it wasn’t always heavy machine guns that did that. Part of the assessment we’re doing now is trying to figure out where in the network these weapons fit in.”
Military authorities on Saturday night were still investigating the identities of the gunmen and how many men were killed. An American military statement said, “Coalition forces believe key terrorists were killed during the airstrike.”
The attack was the latest effort to eliminate an emerging threat to American troops. At least eight American helicopters have crashed or been shot down since January. Military officials have said that Sunni insurgents might be especially motivated to shoot down helicopters as a way of discrediting the new American and Iraqi security plan and undermining military transportation.
Helicopters have also become ever more important over the past few years as ground convoys became increasingly vulnerable. Army helicopters logged 240,000 hours in 2005, 334,000 hours in 2006, and are projected to log 400,000 hours in 2007, the military said. And in a sign of what officials have described as an increased use of offensive air power in Iraq, a second airstrike destroyed a car bomb factory on Saturday in southern Baghdad, the United States military said. Two precision-guided bombs destroyed a building and killed at least seven people suspected of being insurgents who had been firing at American troops in the area, an American military statement said.
Colonel Garver said that the announcement of two airstrikes on the same day did not necessarily mean that more bombs were being dropped, but that it did reflect a broadened presence of American air power over Iraq, with more jets in the air flying closer to American troops on the ground. “The role has expanded to include other missions that we maybe have not used it for in the past, such as a show of force,” he said.