U.S. attack helicopter downed in Baghdad; 2 dead

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Gunmen shot down a U.S. attack helicopter near Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, killing two crew members. A fragile cease-fire was held between Sunni insurgents and Marines in the city of Fallujah, Iraq, while the U.S. military suggested it is open to a negotiated solution in its showdown with a radical Shiite cleric in the south.\nMore than 600 Iraqis, mostly women, children and elderly, have been killed in a week of fighting in Fallujah, Rafie al-Issawi, the director of the city hospital, told The Associated Press. But a Marine commander said most of the dead were probably insurgents.\nFallujah residents took advantage of the lull in fighting to bury their dead in two soccer fields. One of the fields had rows of freshly dug graves, some marked headstones as children or with the names of women.\nThe Fallujah violence spilled over to the nearby western entrance of Baghdad, where gunmen shot down an AH-64 Apache helicopter. As a team moved in to secure the bodies of the two dead crewmen, a large force of tanks and troops pushed down the highway outside the Iraqi capital, aiming to crush insurgents.\nGunmen have run rampant in the Abu Ghraib district west of Baghdad for three days, attacking fuel convoys, killing a U.S. soldier and two American civilians and kidnapping another American.\nThe captors of Thomas Hamill, a Mississippi native who works for a U.S. contractor in Iraq, threatened to kill and burn him unless U.S. troops end their assault on Fallujah, west of Baghdad, by 6 a.m. Sunday. The deadline passed with no word on Hamill's fate.\nInsurgents who kidnapped other foreigners this week began releasing some captives. A Briton was freed and other kidnappers said they were freeing eight captives of various nationalities.\nSporadic battles in Fallujah wounded two Marines, and the bodies of 11 Iraqis were brought to a mosque being used as a clinic. But the truce called by both sides largely held, and the city was the quietest it has been since the U.S. offensive began Monday morning.\nHundreds of Marine reinforcements moved in around Fallujah, joining the 1,200 Marines and 900 Iraqis already there. The military has warned it may resume an all-out assault against Sunni insurgents if negotiations focused on extending the cease-fire and restoring police control of the city fall through.\nPresident Bush, attending an Easter Sunday service at a chapel at the U.S. Army base Fort Hood, Texas, braced Americans for the possibility of more casualties in Iraq while saying the U.S.-led mission is just.\n"It was a tough week last week and my prayers and thoughts are with those who pay the ultimate price for our security," the president said.\nBut he said the United States was "open to suggestions" about resolving the siege, referring to negotiations between Iraqi politicians and Fallujah city officials that continued Sunday.\nGoverning Council members were holding discussions with followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia rose up in a bloody revolt this week against coalition troops and largely controls three southern cities, Karbala, Kufa and Najaf, Iraq.\nThe south was relatively calm, as up to 1.5 million Shiite pilgrims marked al-Arbaeen, one of the holiest days of their religious calendar, in Karbala Sunday, with al-Sadr militiamen and other gunmen keeping security in the streets.\nU.S. commanders have said they would delay any action against al-Sadr until after the ceremonies, which ended Sunday. But for the first time U.S. officials suggested they were open to a nonmilitary solution to the confrontation.\nU.S. coalition spokesman Dan Senor would not comment on Iraqi talks with al-Sadr's followers but added, "I would say that our goal is to minimize bloodshed and to head off any sort of conflict."\n"We don't see it as a necessary requirement that any military action has to occur in Najaf," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters.\nU.S. troops retook the city of Kut, Iraq, from al-Sadr followers over the past three days in what was the first major foray in months by the American military into southern Iraq, where U.S. allies have security duties.\nBut military action to retake the other cities could require fighting near some of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines, raising the possibility of enflaming Shiite anger at the U.S.-led occupation.\n"There are many ways for the town of Najaf to come back under legitimate control of the Iraqi government, coalition provisions authority and that don't involve any fighting at all," Kimmitt said.\nU.S.-allied Iraqi leaders have increasingly expressed anger at the bloodshed in Iraq over the past week, saying the military has used excessive force.\nOver a third of the city's 200,000 residents fled the city during the lull, Marines said. Fallujah hospital's al-Issawi said the number of Iraqi dead in the city was likely higher than the 600 recorded at the hospital and four main clinics in the city.