ISAF copter goes down in Afghanistan

[unknownprince]

ISAF copter goes down in Afghanistan
PressTV - ISAF copter goes down in Afghanistan

Sat Aug 6, 2011 11:2PM GMT



A helicopter operated by the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan (file photo)
Taliban militants say they have shot down a helicopter operated by the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in southeastern Afghanistan.


Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the militants successfully targeted the aircraft on Saturday in the Musakhel district of Khost province, and all those on board were killed in the incident, the Pajhwok news agency reported.

However, ISAF dismissed the Taliban's claim, saying a mechanical failure forced the helicopter to make an emergency landing.

The Western military alliance added that all the crewmembers were rescued and there were no casualties in the incident.

Meanwhile, 31 US special operation troops and seven Afghan commandos were killed when their CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed in the early hours of Saturday morning in the eastern province of Wardak.

The Taliban claimed they downed the helicopter with rocket fire while it was taking part in an attack on a house where militants had gathered.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai made the first announcement of the number of people killed in the crash and the presence of US special operations troops.

US President Barack Obama also commented on the crash.

"Their deaths are a reminder of the extraordinary sacrifices made by the men and women of our military and their families, including all who have served in Afghanistan," Obama said in a statement issued on Saturday.

It was the highest death toll in a single incident for foreign forces deployed in Afghanistan since the US-led war began in 2001.

A total of 374 foreign troops have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year, according to icasualties.org.

MP/HGL

[sahil112]

i was just about to post this aswell wrora but manana

[torkham]

i was going to say 'windfall' but read the news saying US acknowledges the helicopter was shot down.

[khushal]

Wikileaks: Taliban used missiles supplied by US to shoot down US helicopters

Jul 26, 2010

Taliban insurgents appear to have used portable heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles to shoot down US helicopters that were supplied to Afghan mujaheddin by the US in the 1980s to help drive out the Soviet Union, according to documents released by the organisation Wikileaks. Thousands of classified documents related to the Afghan war, released without authorisation by Wikileaks reveal in often excruciating detail the struggles faced by U.S. troops as they battle an increasingly potent Taliban force and also try to work with Pakistani allies who often appear to be helping the Taliban.
The more than 92,000 classified documents. most of which consist of low-level field reports, represent one of the largest single disclosures of such information in US history. Wikileaks gave the documents to the New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks ago on the condition that they not be published prior to Sunday night, when the group released them publicly.
The huge trove of documents covers the period from January 2004 through to December 2009. when the Obama administration began to push more than 30,000 troops into Afghanistan and announced a new strategy. The documents provide new insights into a period in which the Taliban was gaining strength, Afghan civilians were growing increasingly disillusioned with their government, and US troops in the field often expressed frustration at having to fight a war without sufficient resources.
One report from the spring of 2007 refers to witnesses who saw what appeared to be a heat-seeking missile destroy a CH-47 transport helicopter. The New York Times first unearthed the document in its review of the files. The Chinook crash killed five Americans, a British citizen and a Canadian. Even though the initial US report stated that the helicopter was "engaged and struck with a missile", a Nato spokesman suggested that small arms fire was responsible for bringing down the helicopter.


Although the use of such weapons by the Taliban appears to be very limited, the disclosure that relatively low-tech insurgents had acquired such arms would have fostered the impression that the Afghan war effort was faltering at a time when US fatalities in Iraq were at record levels and the Bush administration was struggling to maintain support for the Iraq war even among its Republican base. The Obama has administration blasted Wikileaks for disclosing the classified documents. "Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents," the national security adviser, James Jones, said in a statement. "The United States government learned from news organisations that these documents would be posted."
The Obama administration has not formally decided whether to take legal action against Wikileaks, but will probably review the documents this week before reaching any conclusions. Senior administration officials said they had been anxiously awaiting release of the documents ever since news organisations began calling to inquire about them last week. "There is not a lot new here for those who have been following developments closely," one US official said.
Many of the documents posted by Wikileaks suggest that Pakistan's spy service may be helping Afghan insurgents plan and carry out attacks on US forces in Afghanistan and their Afghan government allies. A few of the reports also describe cooperation between Pakistani intelligence and fighters aligned with al Qa'eda. US intelligence concluded a number of years ago that Pakistan retained its ties with Taliban groups, and has collected voluminous intercept and human reports documenting regular contacts between them, intelligence officials said. Late last year, President Barack Obama warned in a letter to the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, that the United States would no longer put up with the contacts.

But the documents appear to suggest that Pakistan's spy agency may actually have assisted insurgents in planning some attacks, at least in the past. The Pakistani government denied the allegations in the classified intelligence documents. "These reports reflect nothing more than single-source comments and rumors, which abound on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and are often proved wrong after deeper examination," said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States.
The documents detail multiple reports of cooperation between retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who ran Pakistan's spy agency in the late 1980s, and Afghan insurgents battling US forces in the mountainous eastern region of the country. In the latter years of the anti-Soviet insurgency, General Gul worked closely with several mujaheddin fighters who are currently battling US troops and trying to topple the Afghan government. The documents also include reports that General Gul was trying to reestablish contacts with insurgent leaders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose fighters have been responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks on US forces.
Over the past decade, US intelligence has collected voluminous evidence of direct contacts between Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and Jalaluddin Haqqani, Hekmatyar and the Taliban leader Mohammed Omar. That evidence includes both human intelligence and intercepted communications. As the new Afghan war strategy was being formulated late last year, Mr Obama stepped up private pressure on the Pakistanis to sever ties with the Taliban, suggesting that if there was no improvement, the United States would begin to take matters into its own hands. "The key thing to bear in mind is that the administration is not naive about Pakistan," an Obama administration official said. "The problem with the Pakistanis is that the more you threaten them, the more they become entrenched and don't see a path forward with you."
Most of the voluminous store of classified reports reflects the daily grind of life in Afghanistan as covered in news reports for the past few years. In them, junior officers complain about poorly equipped Afghan forces, corrupt Afghan government officials and a US war effort that at times seemed to be seriously wanting for resources. The reports highlight how civilian casualties resulting from mistakes on the battlefield have alienated Afghans. Over the past year, civilian casualties in Afghanistan have dropped significantly. But many of the problems referred to in the memo — a resilient Taliban, porous borders with Pakistani safe havens and largely ineffectual Afghan government — remain. * AP

[khushal]

Aviation Accidents and Incidents in the Afghan War
List of aviation accidents and incidents in the War in Afghanistan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[khushal]

Wikileaks documents suggest Taliban has capacity to fire on aircraft | World news | guardian.co.uk

Wikileaks documents suggest Taliban has capacity to fire on aircraft

Coalition forces have long claimed that Afghan insurgents could not obtain the technology required to shoot down planes
Wikileaks documents suggest that incidences of the Taliban firing on US aircraft have been suppressed from public record. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

• The legendary ability of small, shoulder-born missile launchers to transform the fortunes of otherwise crudely armed insurgents is one of the most alarming threats to emerge from the Wikileaks archive.
  Soviet troops discovered in 1986 when the CIA decided to put heat-seeking Stinger missiles into the hands of the otherwise low-tech Afghan resistance, such weapons can make life impossible for modern armies.
  As depicted in the Tom Hank's film Charlie Wilson's War, bearded warriors were able to stand on hilltops and blast the dreaded Russian attack helicopters out of the sky, ultimately forcing them to fly far higher, to much less effect.
  That image still haunts Nato commanders who are all too aware of how much they rely on thousands of transport planes, helicopters and drone surveillance craft to kill insurgents from the air and move troops around an increasingly hostile theatre of war.
  It has long been the international coalition's claim that whilst the Taliban might try to acquire technology capable of shooting down aircraft they had failed to do so, and were unlikely to ever succeed.
  Nonetheless, the risk is taken extremely seriously and the sight of distraction flares blasting out of the side of military helicopters are a regular sight in the skies above Afghanistan. The countermeasures, designed to confuse the heat seeking cone of the missile, are so sensitively calibrated they can be easily set off by a false alarm. But according to the WikiLeaks documents, there have been several cases of insurgents firing on US aircraft, all of which have been suppressed from the public record.
  In May 2007 a US Chinook was hit by a missile in Helmand after it had departed from the Kajaki base in the north of the province, killing everyone on board, although the US claimed it had been downed by lucky shot from a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) which has no heat seeking capability.
  The previous month the crew of a British Chinook had reported a missile flying 50ft past the aircraft before exploding. In July 2007, the crew of a C-130 transport plane reported that they had seen a rocket fly past them whilst they were refuelling at 11,000 feet. That event was actually reported by British journalist Tom Coghlan who quoted a military spokesman who said any such incidents were classified and could not be commented on.
  An official at HQ ISAF said he too was unable to comment on any incident involving anti-aircraft missiles.
  It is not clear why the coalition is so reluctant to publicly admit the risks posed to coalition aircraft by missiles.
  British defence officials said there was no evidence of weapons bigger than RPGs being fired at helicopters, but insurgents are making greater efforts to shoot down helicopters, which they believe have great propaganda value for them.
  "There is much greater focus on carefully coordinated attacks on helicopters by RPGs [rocket propelled grenades] or small arms", a Ministry of Defence source said. The insurgents "are constantly watching us and adapting their tactics", said a senior military official.
  In the latest incident an American Cobra helicopter was shot at in Marjah in central Helmand province, sources told the Guardian.
  David Cameron was forced last month to abandon a visit to British troops in Helmand province after an intelligence report suggested the Taliban was plotting to target an unnamed VIP. The prime minister's Chinook helicopter diverted after five minutes in the air when the information was received.
  Until very recently intelligence officials have argued that there was little risk that heat-seeking missiles ever be acquired by the Taliban, although the released military intelligence includes numerous reports of insurgent groups in individual provinces who were thought to have the capability as early as 2005.
  A western diplomat recently told the Guardian that the Taliban could not access such weapons because they are not freely available on the black market run by the world's private arms dealers.
  Another obvious source would be foreign government's hostile to the US occupation in Afghanistan, with perhaps the most likely source being neighbouring Iran.
  According to one unconfirmed April 1 2004 intelligence report, seven anti-aircraft missiles, originally acquired in Algeria, were sneaked over the porous Afghan border.
  But one intelligence source told the Guardian that although Shia Iran is happy to provide limited support to insurgents, it would never want to see such weapons in the hands of a Sunni movement which it nearly went to war with in 1998 when the Taliban killed ten Iranian diplomats.
  Another possibility is that the missiles were rare leftovers from the original stock of some 2,000-2,500 Stingers distributed to the mujahideen by the CIA.
  Even though the missile launchers are unlikely to work because their batteries degrade over time, the CIA made a big effort in the 1990s trying to recover as many Stingers as possible, offering between $80,000 and $150,000 per weapon in a buyback programme.

[afgpower]

so there are 2 planes shot down? one yesterday and one today?

[khushal]

so there are 2 planes shot down? one yesterday and one today?

no just one, where did you get 2 from?

[unknownprince]

no just one, where did you get 2 from?

2 copters were shot down. One in Wardak and another in Khost . Wardak is the one where there are many US casualties.

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