3 choppers, 2 crashes, 14 Americans killed in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — Eleven U.S. troops and three American law-enforcement officials were killed in two separate helicopter crashes today, inflicting one of the war’s heaviest one-day losses on U.S. forces, military officials said. (Los Angeles Times)

The crashes involved a total of three choppers, two of which collided in midair in the south of the country, and a third that went down in the wake of a firefight in Afghanistan’s west, according to the NATO force and American officials.

Hostile fire was ruled out in the midair collision, which killed four American troops and injured two others, but the cause of the other crash was not immediately clear. The Taliban claimed to have shot down a Western helicopter today in Afghanistan’s northwest, but it was not clear whether that was the same incident the military described.

Read the full story at latimes.com.