Open Season

It seems to be open season in Iraq on helicopters lately. Six helicopters have been downed in the last two weeks. Clearly the terrorists have picked up either new tactics or new weapons. All of these shoot-downs have been claimed by the umbrella group that includes Al Quaida in Iraq. Iran has been meddling inside Iraq for some time now, but I doubt that they are feeding weapons or training to this specific group since they are Sunnis and Iran is Shiite. In all of these cases there have been sightings of missile fire at the time of the shoot-down. It would appear that Al Quaida has gotten a shipment surface to air missiles in. Probably SA-7's although there's quite a few other possibilities. Regardless which hardware the terrorists are using, clearly a change of tactics is called for. I'm posting this mainly because I'm interested in this subject. If any of you have any more information on this subject, I'd be glad to hear it!

Update 02/11/07: News reports indicate another helicopter may have been lost today bringing the total to seven. This report again indicates that witnesses saw a missile striking the chopper. This is certainly not a case of Jihadis getting off lucky shots with RPG's, someone has definitely fed them some new hardware to use against our helicopters and I'm interested to know who.