A commercial helicopter contracted by the U.S. Defense Department was shot down by missile fire north of the Iraqi capital Thursday, and all nine people on board were killed, U.S. and Bulgarian officials said.

Elsewhere, relatives of Iraqis who have disappeared in a Sunni militant stronghold known as the "Triangle of Death" gathered at a police station to examine photographs of the bodies of dozens of Iraqis that officials said were pulled from the Tigris River in recent weeks.

The Mi-8 helicopter went down about 12 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. Embassy said. Video on television showed burning wreckage scattered across a wide area.

In Sofia, Bulgaria, the Defense Ministry said three of the victims were Bulgarians. The crew was Bulgarian, although no members of Bulgaria's 460-member military contingent in Iraq were on board, it said.

The U.S. military said the helicopter was contracted by the Defense Department. At the Pentagon, a senior defense official said there were six civilian contract workers aboard the aircraft. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he did not know the nationalities of those six victims or their employers.

After a week of stepped-up violence, the country's most feared terror group, Al-Qaida in Iraq, claimed responsibility Thursday for a suicide car bombing that targeted interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's convoy but did not harm the Iraqi leader.

The attack on Allawi's convoy occurred Wednesday, a day of multiple bombings and shootings in Baghdad and elsewhere that killed at least 13 people and wounded 21.

The victims included an Australian security contract worker and two other foreign nationals killed by assailants firing at their vehicle in Baghdad, Australian officials said in Sydney on Thursday.

Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for several of the attacks, including the one on Allawi, in statements that surfaced on Web sites known for their militant content. "Allawi escaped, but if one arrow missed its target, there are many others in the quiver," one of the statements said.

While Allawi, Talabani are good decent folks, we sometimes feel if we are making a mistake in beginning the reconstruction of Iraq and planting democratic traditions there, before we have broken the back of the Islamist ideology that holds in contempt, both democracy as also our re-construction efforts. Should we not have done a Fallujah of the entire Sunni Traingle and other trouble spots like Mosul and Najaf, before embarking on reconstruction and democracy. After all we first lock a wild tiger firmly and safely in a cage, before we begin to feed it, dont we? But in Iraq are we not feeding the wild beast of Islamic fanticism, before we have subdued it fully?

By not making an example of the Islamists, and rushing headlong in to reconstruction and democracy in Iraq, are we putting the cart before the horse in the War on Terror?

Story credits: AP News