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KABUL, Afghanistan — A NATO helicopter crash in Afghanistan on Saturday killing 31 U.S. special-forces troops, including more than 20 Navy SEALS from the unit that killed Osama bin Laden, and 7 Afghan commandos.

It was the deadliest single combat incident for American troops in 10 years of war, according to an American official.

The operators from SEAL Team Six were flown by a crew of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regimen, according to U.S. officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because families are still being notified of the loss of their loved ones.

One source said the team was thought to include 22 SEALs, three Air Force air controllers, seven Afghan Army troops, a dog and his handler, and a civilian interpreter, plus the helicopter crew.

The sources thought this was the largest single loss of life ever for SEAL Team Six, known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group.

A brief statement from the presidential palace said the helicopter had crashed in central Wardak province, an area west of Kabul. The volatile region is known for its strong Taliban presence.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai "shared his deep sorrow and sadness" with U.S. counterpart Barack Obama and the families of the U.S. and Afghan victims, the statement said. Obama, who learned of the deaths while at Camp David, mourned the deaths of the 7 Afghan soldiers killed, and issued a written statement saying Americans' thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those who perished.

The crash is a reminder of the "extraordinary sacrifices" being made by America's military and its families, Obama wrote.

The Taliban claimed to have shot down the troop-carrying Chinook helicopter during a firefight. The Islamist group also said in a statement that eight insurgents had been killed in the battle.

NBC News quoted a Taliban spokesman as claiming the U.S. troops were attacking a compound that was housing militants when the aircraft was brought down. However, the Taliban has been known to make exaggerated claims in the past.

'Enemy activity in the area'
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed the overnight incident and said there "was enemy activity in the area." But it said it was still investigating the cause. The alliance was conducting a recovery operation at the site, it said, without releasing details or a casualty figure.

"We are aware of an incident involving a helicopter in eastern Afghanistan," said U.S. Air Force Capt. Justin Brockhoff, a NATO spokesman. "We are in the process of accessing the facts."

The helicopter was a twin-rotor Chinook, which are used for transport, said an official at NATO headquarters in Brussels, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Chinook was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, a military source reportedly told the New York Times.
Slideshow: Afghanistan: Nation at a crossroads (on this page)

Gen. Abdul Qayoom Baqizoy, police chief of Wardak, told the Times that the joint NATO-Afghan operation began around 1 a.m. Saturday with an attack on a Taliban compound in the village of Jaw-e-mekh Zareen.

He said the resulting firefight lasted at least two hours.

The majority of foreign troops in Wardak, which comes under ISAF's eastern regional command, are American.

The Washington Post reported that a second coalition helicopter made a "precautionary landing" Saturday in Afghanistan's Khost province. Brockhoff, the NATO spokesman, said the helicopter sustained minor damage and no injuries were reported. He rejected Taliban claims that the second aircraft had been shot down.
Interactive: Timeline: The war in Afghanistan (on this page)

Aircraft crashes are relatively frequent in Afghanistan, where insecurity and difficult terrain make air travel essential for coalition forces transporting troops and equipment.

There have been at least 17 coalition and Afghan aircraft crashes in Afghanistan this year. Most of the crashes are attributed to pilot errors, weather conditions or mechanical failures. However, the coalition has confirmed that at least one CH-47F Chinook helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade on July 25, injuring two crewmembers.

Growing unease
The incident comes only two weeks after the start of a gradual process of handing security responsibility from foreign forces to Afghan troops and police, and at a time of growing unease about the increasingly unpopular and costly war.

That process is due to end with all foreign combat troops leaving Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but some U.S. lawmakers have already questioned whether that handover is fast enough.
Interactive: The cost of war (on this page)

The crash was by far the worst incident of the war for foreign troops and easily surpassed the worst incidents of battlefield losses.

In April 2005, another CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed, killing 15 U.S. servicemen and three civilian contractors. Another Chinook crash in June the same year killed 17 U.S. troops.

U.S. and other NATO commanders have claimed success in reversing the momentum of a growing insurgency in the Taliban heartland in the south, although insurgents have shown a worrying ability to adapt their tactics and mount major attacks in other areas.
Video: Mullen: ‘We’re moving in the right direction’ in Afghanistan

Those gains, however, have come at a price, with 711 foreign troops killed in Afghanistan in 2010, easily the deadliest year of the war for all concerned since the Taliban were toppled by U.S.-backed foreign troops in late 2001.

The crash in Wardak means that at least 374 foreign troops have been killed so far in 2011, more than two-thirds of them American, according to independent monitor www.icasualties.com and figures kept by Reuters.

Despite the alarming military toll, ordinary Afghan civilians have continued to bear the brunt of the war, with civilian casualties also hitting record levels in the first six months of this year, according to U.N. figures.

Earlier on Saturday, Afghan police said a NATO airstrike killed eight civilians in southern Helmand province on Friday.

ISAF confirmed there had been an airstrike in Helmand's Nad Ali district and said it was investigating whether civilians had been present at the time. Helmand, a Taliban stronghold, is the deadliest province in Afghanistan for international troops.

Civilian casualties caused by foreign troops hunting Taliban fighters and other insurgents have long been a major source of friction between Kabul and its Western backers.

Nad Ali district police chief Shidi Khan said the airstrike was called in after insurgents attacked ISAF troops in the area.

Schmidle was working on a different article for the New Yorker when news of the bin Laden raid broke May 1. He discussed writing a reconstruction of the raid with his immediate editor, Daniel Zalewski, who took the idea to David Remnick, the New Yorker’s top editor. Remnick agreed to shelve the other story and go full speed ahead: “It doesn’t take a very intelligent editor to know that’s the story we had to do,” he said Tuesday.

As Schmidle describes it, the story was built on about two dozen interviews, including with Brennan and other senior officials. “It’s a circuitous process,” Schmidle said. “One source was willing to share something that gets a second source to talk. That opens up a third source. And then you go back to the first source.”

Determining what wasn’t true was just as important as what was, he says. A TV report that the SEALs wore helmet cams during their assault, for example, turns out to have been wrong.

Schmidle says he wasn’t able to interview any of the 23 Navy SEALs involved in the mission itself. Instead, he said, he relied on the accounts of others who had debriefed the men.

But a casual reader of the article wouldn’t know that; neither the article nor an editor’s note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.

The SEALs, he writes of the raid’s climactic moment, “instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft,” the mission’s name for bin Laden, implying that the SEALs themselves had conveyed this impression to him.

He also writes that the raiders “were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections — on which this account is based — may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.”

Except that the account was based not on their recollections but on the recollections of people who spoke to the SEALs.

Remnick says he’s satisfied with the accuracy of the account. “The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,” he said. “I know who they are. Those are the rules of the road around here. We have the time to do this. There isn’t always time” for publications with shorter deadlines to do the same checking.

Schmidle, meanwhile, says he’s received positive feedback from his sources and others familiar with the raid since the article was published. Among the satisfied customers: Schmidle’s father, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Robert E. Schmidle Jr., the deputy commander of the U.S. Cyber Command.

...While Schmidle is an experienced journalist with service in Pakistan and elsewhere, his access to those involved in the kill’s top secret planning and operation, and his unrelenting positive spin of the story (in accord with the Obama’s campaign to valorize the singular accomplishment), could be explained by his access to his father, Richard Schmidle, a general in Special Operations and now deputy commander for U.S. Cyber Command.

...One may ask at first blush why a feel-good story about the Bin Laden raid is problematic or even merits sustained critique. From an American point of view, the story reads like the film script Schmidle may well aspire to write. It confirms all that we wanted to know about the raid and the bravado of our SEALS. The shooter, who finally killed Bin Laden, even managed to mutter “For God and Country” in the femtoseconds that his synapses took to pull the trigger, according to Schmidle.

However, there are implications that go well beyond Mr. Schmidle’s limits of journalism integrity and his own personal aggrandizement and professional aspirations.

First, many Muslims across the world fundamentally doubt the events of the Bin Laden raid. Some believe Bin Laden is still alive. Others believe he died long ago. Others believe that the events of May 2 were staged to allow the Obama administration to make an exit from Afghanistan. As Mr. Schmidle’s is the first (and so far only) account of the drama, these problems cast a pale of doubt upon the events that transpired that evening.

Second is the simple fact of Mr. Schmidle parentage. His father, as noted above, is the deputy commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. Given the conspiratorial propensities of many within and beyond the Muslim world, Schmidle’s ties to this organization by virtue of his father would recast any serious inaccuracy in his report as a U.S. military psychological operation to deliberately misinform the world about the operation...

Jeff wrote:The very first reports of the crash I heard carried the Pentagon's confirmation that it had been shot down by the Taliban. I found that exceptional. If I recall correctly, an admission that a crash was due to hostile fire is only very reluctantly and sluggishly made.