The drone may well have been intended more to monitor Iranian dissidents in Iraq than to eavesdrop on American or Iraqi military operations. The location where it was shot down is not far from Camp Ashraf, where 3,500 followers of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, an Iranian dissident organization, have taken refuge. Camp Ashraf is 57 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Iraqi troops have surrounded the camp in the past week and clashed with refugees there. Iran has long insisted that Iraq close the camp and expel the dissidents, but United States officials have intervened and prevented that. Since January, when the Iraqi military took over security of the area from the United States, several Iraqi officials have vowed it would soon be closed.

The United States military identified the drone as an Ababil 3, an aircraft developed by Iran with a 10.5-foot wingspan, launched from a truck catapult and recovered by parachute. The name means “swallow.”

It is equipped with video camera and transmission equipment, and flown by ground-based pilots.

The United States military also announced that a soldier died Monday of wounds received in a combat operation in Baghdad, the first American death in Iraq since March 7.

Five American soldiers have died in Iraq so far this month. If that rate continues, March will have the lowest level of United States deaths since the war began.

Last month, 18 allied soldiers died, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a nongovernmental organization that tracks military deaths using Defense Department statistics. The soldier’s death on Monday was the first United States military fatality reported in Baghdad this month.

Elsewhere in Iraq, the violence in Mosul continued, for which the blame is largely placed on Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown jihadi group believed to have some foreign leadership.