U.S. helicopter crashes in remote Afghan mountains

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The mountaintop landing zone where a U.S. helicopter crashed near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan is a day's walk from the nearest passable road.

The area's only residents are al-Qaida and Taliban militants holed up in makeshift bases where U.S. and Afghan forces are now hunting them down.

"That area is a place where nobody is living, but I can confirm that it is a dangerous area. The enemy lives there," said Gen. Abdul Ghafar, the police chief of Kunar province where the helicopter went down Friday afternoon.

Ten U.S. soldiers on a combat operation to flush out Taliban insurgents died, military officials said Saturday.

The CH-47 Chinook was conducting operations on a mountaintop landing zone when the crash occurred. Other aircraft and crews were also at the landing zone and said hostile forces did not cause the crash, the U.S. military said.

"There is no indication that the helicopter came down due to some enemy action," Lt. Tamara D. Lawrence, a coalition spokeswoman, told The Associated Press.

The crash site was near the town of Asadabad, the provincial capital of Kunar about 10 miles northwest of a U.S. base and about 150 miles east of the capital Kabul.

Some 2,500 Afghan and U.S. soldiers are conducting a joint military operation in Kunar province, near the border with Pakistan. It's one of the biggest offensives since the ouster of the hardline Taliban regime by U.S.-led forces in late 2001 for hosting al-Qaida.

Asadabad -- where the U.S. military has a large base -- is in a large valley surrounded by rugged mountains.

"The area of the crash is a mountainous area and it is difficult to reach," Ghafar said.

Recovery operations did not begin until daybreak Saturday. The military did not say what unit the U.S. troops were from, only specifying that they were soldiers.

The crash was the deadliest for U.S. forces here in a year and comes at a time of increasing militant attacks in Afghanistan's southern and eastern provinces, where militants have been using suicide and roadside bombs more than ever.

The 10 deaths bring to at least 25 the number of U.S. military personnel killed in Afghanistan this year, according to the Web site icasualties.org, which relies on Defense Department information.

At least 234 U.S. military personnel, including those killed Friday, have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department.

News of the crash came the same day the U.S. ambassador in charge of counterterrorism called parts of Pakistan's mountainous border region a "safe haven" for militants and said Osama bin Laden was more likely to be hiding there than in Afghanistan.

Henry Crumpton lauded Pakistan for arresting "hundreds and hundreds" of al-Qaida figures but said that it needed to do more.

The chief spokesman for Pakistan's army, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, dismissed Crumpton's comments as "absurd."

Pakistan has launched repeated counterterrorism operations in its lawless tribal regions over the past two years, leaving hundreds of militants and soldiers dead.

"Our expectation is that they will continue to make progress, and we know that it's difficult," Crumpton said. Pakistan "can't remain a safe haven for enemy forces, and right now parts of Pakistan are indeed that."

A purported Taliban spokesman, Mohammed Hanif, called the AP to claim that Taliban militants had shot down the helicopter using a "new weapon" that he refused to specify. The phone call did not come until after news of the crash was made public.

"The Taliban have made those claims before and they have turned out to be completely false, and there's absolutely no indication that hostile action caused this crash," Lawrence said.

Last June, all 16 troops on board a Chinook died in Kunar when it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade -- the deadliest militant attack against American forces in Afghanistan.

In September, a Chinook helicopter crashed in a mountainous area in southeastern province of Zabul, killing all five American crew members.

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Associated Press reporters Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Munir Ahmad in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.