At Least 15 Dead Near Fallujah

"It does appear that a U.S. helicopter was probably shot down from the ground and it crashed, and a large number of Americans, possibly 12, 13, maybe more even have died," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington.

That was the word after an Iraqi rebel, firing a shoulder-mounted weapon, downed a CH-47 Chinook Sunday as it carried weary soldiers to some well-deserved R&R. At last count, 15 soldiers had been killed, at least 20 were wounded. Together with two other attacks on American forces on a day declared by Iraqi guerrillas as a "day of resistance," the shoot-down made Sunday the deadliest day there since March.

"Our initial report is that they were being transported to BIA for R&R flights," said a military  spokeswoman in Baghdad. She said some of the troops killed in the missile strike came from Camp Ridgway, believed to be an 82nd Airborne Division base in western Iraq.

Witnesses reported two missiles had been fired from a grove of palm trees as the Chinook passed close by.  The profile of the missiles' ascent indicated they were heat-seekers, zeroing in on the helicopter's exhaust ports. Under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi army had a large inventory of SA-7 Strelas.

Fallujah resident Yassin Mohamed said he heard an explosion, then ran out of his house, a half-mile away. "I saw the Chinook burning. I ran toward it because I wanted to help put out the fire, but couldn't get near because of American soldiers."

"This was a new lesson from the resistance, a lesson to the greedy aggressors," one resident of Fallujah told reporters, refusing to give his name. "They'll never be safe until they get out of our country," he said.

"In a long, hard war, we're going to have tragic days, as this is," Rumsfeld told ABC's "This Week." "But they're necessary. They're part of a war that's difficult and complicated."

Speaking on CNN the day before the shoot-down, America's top civil administrator, Paul Bremmer, said of the military situation, "It's getting worse in the sense that as today we've seen that the enemies of freedom there are using more sophisticated techniques to attack our forces."

FMI: www.army.mil