Video of Al Qaeda Shooting Down a US Chinook Helicopter in Karma, Iraq

I am looking for translators to translate this post into German and Bulgarian. Email me if you are interested.

Serbo-Croatian translation (u Srpsko-hrvatski). Spanish translation (en Español).

Here is the video of Iraqi Al Qaeda shooting down what was originally widely reported to be a US Chinook helicopter, but was actually a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter (a closely related chopper) in Karma on February 7, three days ago. Seven soldiers were killed when the helicopter was downed.

The Sea Knight, like the CH-47 Chinook, is used mostly for transporting soldiers, casualties and supplies to and from the battlefield. It was last produced in 1971 but is still widely used by the US Marines. The CH-46 was actually the first Chinook produced for the Army but the Army rejected it as too small. The Marines decided it was just fine. After 1962, it was renamed the Sea Knight.

Since 1971, the Sea Knight has undergone a series of upgrades. Drawings comparing the Chinook and the Sea Knight are here. The Pentagon is refusing to say what downed the copter, but is implying that mechanical problems took the bird down.

If you look closely at the video, around 1:16 you will see what appears to be a SAM missile flying and hitting the copter. I don't think this was mechanical failure. It is particularly creepy to watch the dying chopper flail for a minute or so in the air before crashing. One shudders to imagine what the crew was thinking during that one last minute of their lives...

Karma is northwest of Baghdad and a little ways northeast of Fallujah. When you hear "Karma",just think Fallujah. It's pretty much the same mindset, population, terrain, etc. Karma has been terribly unstable for many months now.

We heard reports 1-2 years of Marines based in this town amidst primitive conditions trying to stabilize it. The reports suggested that this was one of the hottest areas in all Iraq, with a hostile population, an untrustworthy Iraqi Army embedded with the Marines (the Iraqi soldiers had the odd habit of moving to the periphery of the base just before insurgent rocket attacks.

Marines dealt with continuous roadside bomb, rocket, mortar, small arms and RPG attacks. Virtually none of the local population could be trusted. No matter what one thought of the war, you had to feel sympathy and pride for our troops trying to stick it out amidst this mess.

How many Marines could write a 500-word essay on US imperialism anyway? How many Marines would not understand the question or deny that US imperialism even existed? Soldiers are soldiers everywhere. They are rarely the bad guys.

Karma has continued to be hot and efforts to stabilize the area, ongoing for possibly years now, appear to have failed. Much of the Fallujah population has displaced to Saqlawiyah and Karma, towns outside Fallujah, often in refugee camps or else staying with friends or relatives.

A US reporter who visited these camps after the first US offensive on Fallujah in April 2004 reported that 100% of the 150,000 population either supported the guerrillas or were part of the guerrillas in some way or other. That's 150,000 guerrillas or active guerrilla supporters right there.

Much has been written about the six US helicopters downed in the past 3 weeks. The guerrillas appear to be on a roll. The majority of these take downs appear to have been with very heavy machine gun fire. That's heavy machine gun fire - not AK-47 automatic weapons fire. Withering fire with a heavy machine gun, or better yet multiple guns, can indeed take down a helicopter.

Which is the reason that the copters try to avoid altitudes below 1,000-1,500 - the machine gun fire kill zone. Above 3,000-3,500 feet, the copters start getting vulnerable to shoulder-fired surface-to-air (SAM) missiles. That leaves a narrow envelope between 1,500-3,000 feet that is a safer zone.

But helicopters need to fly low to attack the enemy and to drop off and pick up troops, supplies and casualties. Furthermore, the US relies very heavily on helicopters in the ground war in Iraq.

Bottom line is that flying a helicopter in Iraq is not that much different from flying one in Vietnam, where many US copters were also shot down. Even lunatic $700 billion US defense budgets cannot cure some endemic problems. The Chinook is one of the better-defended US copters but no helicopter is invulnerable and the newer Russian-made SAM's are very good.

At the end of the day, it's more a contest of wits between the helicopter pilot and his enemies and may the best man win. Despite all the gloomy talk about doomed copters, the rate of US copters shot down in Iraq has been low compared to other wars.