Taliban rebels claimed responsibility for bringing down the twin-rotor aircraft, which is capable of carrying dozens of troops, and said everyone on board had died.

"A US CH-47 helicopter crashed west of Asadabad today while it was transporting additional forces into an area in support of US forces currently conducting counter-terrorism operations," the US military said in a statement.

A spokesman for the ousted Taliban regime claimed responsibility for the crash in the eastern province of Kunar, which borders Pakistan and has been a traditional stronghold of Taliban and other Islamic militants.

"We shot down a helicopter in Kunar," Taliban spokesman Mullah Abdul Latif Hakimi told AFP by satellite phone from an undisclosed location.

The United States said the "cause of the crash and the state of the survivors," remained unclear. The statement said there was an ongoing operation in the province, with "US fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters currently providing close air support to the forces on the ground".

Hakimi said the helicopter was in the area after Taliban militants had seized seven Afghans "working as spies for the Americans with satellite phones and maps" and seeking militants in the mountainous area.

"Taliban recognised the seven spies, arrested them, tried and executed them," Hakimi added. "Among the seven, one of them managed to get the message out to the Americans, who came with helicopters."

He said the Chinook was shot down near a village called Shurak and that all passengers on board were killed. There was no way of independently confirming his account.

Chinooks are a mainstay of the US-led coalition force in rugged Afghanistan.

"If they are combat-loaded, they would carry 24, and if they are not, then they could (carry) up to 33 people," Lieutenant Cindy Moore told AFP.

The US-led coalition launched the operation to oust the Taliban in late 2001 when they refused to hand over Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

In recent weeks, the 18,000-strong US coalition force has been stepping up pressure on militants in southern and southeastern Afghanistan to chase them out of their strongholds in the run-up to September parliamentary elections.

In one of the bloodiest offensives since the fall of the Taliban, scores of militants were killed last week in southern Afghanistan.

The US military put the death toll at 77, while Afghan government officials said they had killed 178 insurgents, most of them when US aircraft hammered militant positions in an 11-hour bombardment.

US forces flying missions above Afghanistan's difficult, mountainous terrain have suffered nine helicopter crashes since the end of 2001, including the one on Tuesday.

A US military helicopter went down in a sandstorm in southeastern Afghanistan in April, killing 18 people, three of them civilians, in the worst crash suffered by US forces in Afghanistan.

The seven previous crashes before the April accident claimed 21 lives.

A Black Hawk helicopter pilot was killed near the western city of Herat in October.

Six people - three US military personnel and three American civilians - died last November when their rented civilian transport plane crashed in central Afghanistan's Bamiyan province.

In December 2002 seven German soldiers died in a crash during a routine reconnaissance flight over Kabul.

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