Fifteen US soldiers killed in helicopter strike
The crippled Chinook helicopter came down in farmland at 9am near the village of Baisa, south of Falluja, a fiercely anti-US town 30 miles west of the capital.
US helicopters circled above the smoking wreckage. Other helicopters and US Humvee vehicles were parked nearby. US Army spokesman Colonel William Darley told reporters the cause of the crash was under investigation.
Other US officials and witnesses said the helicopter, carrying troops on a rest and recreation break, had been shot down.
Some Iraqis were jubilant. "The Americans are pigs. We will hold a celebration because this helicopter went down a big celebration," said wheat farmer Saadoun Jaralla near the crash site. "The Americans are enemies of mankind."
It was the third time guerrillas had brought down a US helicopter since President George W Bush declared major combat over in Iraq on May 1.
"Clearly it is a tragic day for Americans," US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.
"In a long hard war we are going to have tragic days."
But he said the United States would not be deterred and would win the war in Iraq.
Mr Bush vowed on Saturday to stand firm and said leaving Iraq prematurely would strengthen the "terrorists" he blamed for recent suicide bombings.
A US spokesman said two Chinooks had been heading for Baghdad airport when one was "shot down by an unknown weapon".
A witness, Dawoud Suleiman, said: "There were two American helicopters.
"They fired a missile at one and missed, and then they hit the other, which crashed and caught fire."
Before the helicopter attack, 123 US soldiers had died in hostilities in Iraq in the past six months, including one killed by an overnight roadside bomb blast in Baghdad and two by a bomb in the northern city of Mosul the day before.
Fighters have killed 27 US soldiers in an eight-day surge in violence that began with last Sunday's rocketing of a Baghdad hotel hosting US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
The next day four suicide attacks killed 35 people at the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and three police stations in the capital.
The attacks prompted the United Nations, the ICRC and other aid agencies to pull more foreign staff from Baghdad and review their operations, in a fresh blow to reconstruction efforts.
The US military commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, said on Saturday that his forces remained on the offensive in the face of "what we regard as a strategically and operationally insignificant surge of attacks".
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