BAGHDAD, Iraq — A U.S. Army reconnaissance helicopter crashed Friday in Mosul, killing the two pilots, and a senior officer said it may have been shot down. It was the second deadly helicopter crash to hit the American military in Iraq in just under a week.
The armed OH-58 Kiowa was with another U.S. helicopter on a combat air patrol supporting Iraqi police who had come under fire in the northern city when it went down.
Lt. Gen. John Vines, chief of the Multi-National Corps Iraq, told Pentagon reporters in a videoconference that the military had indications the crash was due to hostile fire. Soldiers on the ground had said there was some firing in the area when it crashed.
The helicopter crashed in what appeared to be a pile of garbage near a group of mud huts in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.
"It was responding to small arms fire being taken by Iraqi police. The gunmen fled to a nearby mosque," said Maj. Richard Greene, executive officer of the 172nd Stryker Brigade's 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment.
Elsewhere, hundreds of Iraqi police candidates left restive Anbar province Friday for training in the capital, including 200 men who survived a suicide bombing last week that killed 58 people.
Half of the 400 police candidates that left in a convoy from Ramadi for Baghdad were from Qaim, a frontier town near the Syrian border that has been the scene of repeated fighting between U.S. forces and insurgents — including many foreign fighters. Anbar is predominantly Sunni Arab and is the focal point of much of the insurgency in Iraq.
The other 200 candidates were from Ramadi, an insurgent hotbed where a suicide bomber hit applicants at a police recruitment center on Jan. 5, killing more than 30 people. "Despite that attack, the recruits returned en masse today," Marine Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool said.
The men are part of an effort to return police to Anbar, including Ramadi and nearby Fallujah.
"There are approximately 1,200 Iraqi police officers patrolling the streets of Fallujah with 400 more attending the Baghdad Police Academy. This is the first large group of Iraqi police candidates from Ramadi and the Western Euphrates River Valley to attend the Ministry of Interior's police training," Pool said from Ramadi.
U.S. soldiers from 2nd Brigade Combat Team helped provide security for the convoy to Baghdad, he added.
U.S.-led coalition forces are helping train police and army units as part of the effort to turn over security and the fight against the insurgency to Iraqi forces.
The helicopter crash came nearly a week after a Black Hawk helicopter carrying eight U.S. troops and four American civilians went down near the northern city of Tal Afar, killing all aboard. Pentagon officials said the cause of that crash was still being investigated, although bad weather was reported in the area at the time.
Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, confirmed that the two pilots on board the Kiowa died in Friday's crash, but they were not identified pending notification of relatives.
The U.S. military has predicted more violence in the weeks ahead as Iraq's splintered politicians and religious groups struggle to form a government.
U.S. Brig. Gen. Donald Alston said Thursday that attacks that have killed at least 500 Iraqis and 54 American forces since the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections were a sign insurgents were using the transition to a new government to destabilize the democratic process.
Violence dropped after Iraqis began celebrating the four-day Islamic feast of sacrifice, Eid al-Adha, on Tuesday. But Alston said it was likely to rise.
"As democracy advances in the form of election results and government formation, and as the military pressure continues, and the pressure generated by political progress increases, we expect more violence across Iraq," Alston said.
Final election results have been delayed by Sunni Arab complaints of fraud, but are expected next week. Although leading politicians have expressed hopes a government could be formed in February, most experts and officials agree it could take two to three months, as it did after the Jan. 30 elections for an interim government.
The governing United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite religious bloc, has a strong lead, according to preliminary results. But it won't win enough seats in the 275-member parliament to avoid forming a coalition with Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties.
At least 121 people were killed last week in twin suicide attacks at a Shiite shrine in the holy city of Karbala and the Ramadi recruiting center. A day earlier, 32 people were killed by a suicide bomber at a Shiite funeral in Muqdadiyah. Twenty-nine more died in an attack Monday on the Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad.
Associated Press writer Nick Wadhams in Mosul contributed to this report.