10 GIs Die in Crash of U.S. Helicopter

Ten U.S. soldiers died when their helicopter crashed during combat operations aimed at flushing out militants from remote mountains in eastern Afghanistan, officials said Saturday.

The crash of the CH-47 Chinook on Friday afternoon was the deadliest for U.S. forces here in a year and came at a time of increasing militant attacks, though U.S. officials ruled out hostile fire as a cause.

“There is no indication that the helicopter came down due to some enemy action,” said Lt. Tamara D. Lawrence, a coalition spokeswoman.

About 2,500 Afghan and U.S. soldiers are conducting a joint military campaign, dubbed Operation Mountain Lion, in Kunar province near the border with Pakistan. It is one of the biggest offensives since the ouster of the hard-line Taliban government by U.S.-led forces in late 2001.

The transport helicopter was conducting “operations on a mountaintop landing zone” when it crashed near Asadabad in Kunar, about 110 miles east of the capital, Kabul, the military said.

The terrain surrounding Asadabad, where the U.S. military has a large base, is extremely rugged. The police chief of Kunar province, Gen. Abdul Ghafar, said the helicopter crashed about 10 miles northwest of the base at a remote spot a day’s walk from any passable road.

Recovery operations began at daybreak Saturday. The military did not say what unit the U.S. troops were with, only that they were soldiers.

Attacks have been on the rise in Afghanistan’s southern and eastern provinces, where militants increasingly have been using suicide and roadside bombs.

At least 234 U.S. military personnel, including those killed Friday, have died in Afghanistan or neighboring Pakistan or Uzbekistan as a result of the conflict, according to the U.S. Defense Department.

News of the crash came the same day a top U.S. official called parts of Pakistan’s mountainous border region a “safe haven” for militants and said that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was more likely to be hiding there than in Afghanistan.

Henry A. Crumpton, the U.S. ambassador at large in charge of counter-terrorism, lauded Pakistan for arresting “hundreds and hundreds” of Al Qaeda figures but said it needed to do more.

The chief spokesman for Pakistan’s army, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, said Crumpton’s assertion was “absurd.”

Pakistan has launched numerous counter-terrorism operations in its lawless tribal regions in the last two years, and hundreds of militants and soldiers have been killed.

“Our expectation is that they will continue to make progress, and we know that it’s difficult,” Crumpton said. Pakistan “can’t remain a safe haven for enemy forces, and right now parts of Pakistan are indeed that.”

Crumpton said U.S. officials continued to believe that Bin Laden was somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border and that there was a “higher probability” that he was on the Pakistan side.

“If we knew exactly where Bin Laden was, we’d go get him,” he said.