What happened to the chopper attacks?

[Merv Benson]

USA Today reports on a non event that is a win for our operations in Iraq.

The U.S. military has broken up a network of insurgents who were behind a string of deadly attacks on U.S. helicopters in Iraq this winter, the Army's top aviation officer in Iraq said.

Some insurgent teams were killed when U.S. helicopter pilots flew over ambush sites and fired on them.

"I don't think they anticipated our rapid and very capable response to them," Maj. Gen. James Simmons said in a telephone interview from Iraq.

Simmons didn't identify when the raids took place or the number of insurgents killed or captured, but he said it was fewer than 100.

...

A surge in fatal attacks on U.S. helicopters this winter threatened to hamper flight operations and generated headlines for insurgent groups.

Enemy fighters shot down six military helicopters in January and February, killing 23 servicemembers. Heavy machine guns were used in four attacks and small arms in one assault. A missile was used to down one of the six helicopters. Two private contractor helicopters were also shot down during that time.

There haven't been any fatal helicopter attacks since February. Two servicemen were injured in an attack on a Kiowa helicopter May 8. A Black Hawk helicopter was forced down by heavy machine gun fire April 5. No one was injured, the Army said.

The raids on the insurgents, which gave allied forces more control in the skies over Iraq to aid the three-month-old security plan, were an intelligence and military success, Simmons said. "It has helped us in our ability to conduct operations without significant interference from the enemy," he said.

...

There is a little more on the way they were able to defeat the enemy tactic of attacking the choppers. Sometimes we missed the wins that begin with an absence of news.

[tequila]

This is also good news.

In an unrelated development, U.S. forces on Saturday killed a man they said was the organizer of a well-planned guerrilla assault in January in which gunmen, posing as Americans, drove into a government compound in the southern Shiite holy city of Karbala, killed a U.S. soldier, then abducted four other U.S. soldiers, who were later killed.

Azhar al-Dulaimi was killed in a raid on a building north of Sadr City, a large Shiite district in the capital, said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the U.S. military's top spokesman in Iraq. He said Dulaimi initially appeared to surrender but was shot while attempting to grab a soldier's gun and died en route to the hospital.

Dulaimi was linked to the Karbala attack by fingerprints found at the scene, Caldwell said, adding that other evidence showed that Dulaimi was trained by Iranian intelligence operatives and the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah. Dulaimi was also linked to the kidnapping of an Iraqi American soldier in October and a mass kidnapping at an Iraqi Education Ministry building last year, Caldwell said. There was no indication that the Iranian government had ordered the Karbala attack, Caldwell said.

Shows what I know. This is the first Iraqi Shia I've heard of from the al-Dulaim tribe. I have read on some Iraqi blogs that having al-Dulaimi on one's ID card can get someone shot at certain Shia-run checkpoints in Baghdad.