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Eight US soldiers have been killed and 14 injured when a helicopter crashed in an insurgency-hit part of southeastern Afghanistan after a “sudden loss of power,” the US-led coalition said.
The twin-rotor transport chopper came down in darkness in the southeastern province of Zabul, about 250 kilometres (155 miles) southwest of the capital Kabul, not far from a main highway, residents and officials said Sunday.
The coalition would not release the location and details of the incident until the recovery operation was completed.
“Eight coalition personnel were killed and 14 others were wounded early Sunday when a coalition CH-47 helicopter had a sudden, unexplained loss of power and control and crashed in eastern Afghanistan,” a coalition statement said.
“The helicopter was transporting a total of 22 people, including aircrew, at the time of the crash,” it said.
The coalition said an investigation would be launched to verify the cause of the crash. It had said earlier the chopper came down after reporting engine failure.
Zabul is a rugged and mountainous area that sees regular clashes between security forces and fighters from the Islamist Taliban movement.
The coalition advised Afghans to stay away from the crash site for their own safety. “Recent reporting indicated a Taliban build-up for operations against the coalition forces in the region,” it said.
The chopper was on a transport mission and not a combat operation, coalition spokesman Lieutenant Colonel David Accetta told AFP. He could not confirm the destination of the aircraft.
“It had a sudden unexplained loss of power and control. We are not sure what caused that,” he said.
“It is far too early in the investigation to say how they died but initial indications are that they were injured and killed in the crash. There will be a thorough investigation to verify if that is the case,” he said.
The bodies had been recovered and the wounded were at a military medical facility, he said. Information about their condition could not be released to the media.
The deaths take to 12 the number of foreign troops who have died in Afghanistan this year. Some 170 were killed in the country last year, about two-thirds in hostile action.
The coalition is made up of 11,000 mostly US troops who are in Afghanistan to help the government round up Taliban insurgents and their allies, including Al-Qaeda militants, and to train the fledgling Afghan security forces.
There are altogether about 27,000 US soldiers in Afghanistan, some working with a separate NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
There have been several deadly helicopter crashes, most of them accidents, involving foreign forces and other groups that came to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001 to help stabilise and build the war-shattered country.
None are known to involve shoulder-to-air missiles and the only acknowledged shooting down of a coalition aircraft in Afghanistan was in June 2005 when a US Chinook helicopter crashed in the eastern province of Kunar, killing all 16 servicemen on board.
The US military said it was shot down by a “lucky strike” from a rocket-propelled grenade.
The last chopper crash in Afghanistan was in early December, when a civilian helicopter went down between the southern city of Kandahar and Uruzgan province. All eight people on board were killed.
The Taliban claimed to have shot down the chopper, but the hardline movement regularly makes false claims. The cause of the crash was not made public.
The 1996-2001 hardline Taliban regime was toppled when the US-led coalition invaded weeks after the September 11 attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda leaders who had found sanctuary in Afghanistan.
The insurgency, said to be backed by the Al-Qaeda terror network, was at its deadliest last year, with more than 4,000 people killed, although most of them were militants.
Authorities reported Sunday the killing of seven Afghans in the latest incidents linked to the violence.
They were three policemen and two men dragged from a mosque and shot in Taliban attacks, a journalist killed by unknown gunmen in his home, and a civilian killed by ISAF troops fearing a suicide attack in Kandahar city.
