Sunnis shooting down aircraft in Anbar with missiles?

Another helicopter went down in Anbar, no fatalities, 18 wounded. This is the third aircraft to go down in Anbar in two weeks.

At this point there's no evidence to say that these were shot down, the military holds that all three went down for mechanical reasons, but I do want to point back to this unconfirmed AP report four days ago. (UPDATED LINK.)

In one recent case, an Iraqi official said $25 million in (private) Saudi money went to a top Iraqi Sunni cleric and was used to buy weapons, including Strela, a Russian shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile. The missiles were purchased from someone in Romania, apparently through the black market, he said....

The U.S. military said it had no information about the cause of the (F-16) crash. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman, said he would be surprised if the jet was shot down because F-16's have not encountered weapons capable of taking them down in Iraq.

But last week, a spokesman for Saddam's ousted Baath party claimed that fighters armed with a Strela missile had shot down the jet.

"We have stockpiles of Strelas and we are going to surprise them (the Americans)," Khudair al-Murshidi, the spokesman told the AP in Damascus, Syria. He would not say how the Strelas were obtained.

Saddam's army had Strelas; it is not known how many survived the 2003 war. The Strela is a shoulder-fired, low-altitude system with a passive infrared guidance system.

I would treat this as iffy rumor at this point, but even the threat of an effective anti-aircraft missile would be disastrous for the US.

If you look back to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, it was the arrival of the US made Stinger AA missiles that really crippled their operations by limiting air mobility, not to mention the atrocious large scale casualties. The inability to move troops by helicopter put every mission at risk on the road, and rapid response and reinforcement was crippled.

So this maybe nothing, but keep an eye open.

(And, I'm not an expert in the area, but here's the FAS page on the SA-7 Strela 2 and the SA-14 Strela 3.)