Iraqi civilians stood behind the ruins of a house after a raid by a joint Iraqi and American force early yesterday in Sadr City in Baghdad. Two civilians were killed and four others were wounded in the raid as they slept on the roofs of their houses, police said. Two other civilians were arrested during the operation.
(karim kadim/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
US troops search for British captives in Iraq
Consultant, 4 bodyguards were abducted
BAGHDAD -- Scores of US troops descended on the vast Shi'ite district of Sadr City in Baghdad late Tuesday and early yesterday, residents there said, searching several houses in what appeared to be an intense hunt for a British financial consultant and four British bodyguards abducted on Tuesday.
The five were taken from a Finance Ministry building by dozens of men dressed in police uniforms as the consultant, who works for the US firm
The size and efficiency of the kidnapping force, the ease with which they carried out the operation in a government compound, and the Finance Ministry's close proximity to Sadr City, about 1.5 miles away, Iraqi officials said, all pointed to a possible connection to Shi'ite militias.
The Mahdi Army militia loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has its stronghold in Sadr City, but a spokesman for the cleric said the militia was not involved in the kidnapping.
"It has been a known fact for some time that the Interior Ministry police, security units and forces are corrupt, are penetrated," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told BBC radio yesterday, saying he suspected the Mahdi Army of involvement in the abductions.
"The number of people who were involved in the operation to seal off the building, to set roadblocks and to get into the building with such confidence must have some connections," he said. "There must be some unholy, unruly militias working beyond the law in that area, with this connection with the local police, to be able kidnap these people."
Kidnappings of foreigners have become fairly rare in Iraq, but kidnappings of Iraqis are a daily occurrence, as one yesterday illustrated. Police in Hawijah, about 30 miles southwest of the northern city of Kirkuk, said that 17 farm laborers working at a local Iraqi Army base were abducted when their bus stopped at a fake checkpoint set up by gunmen wearing police uniforms.
A US source familiar with the Baghdad abductions, but who was not authorized to speak publicly about them, said it was "the feeling of 99 percent of the people in the embassy" that the Mahdi Army or rogue elements from it were somehow involved in the kidnappings.
Security officials said the kidnapping could have been tied to the killing in Basra last week of a top Mahdi Army commander, Wisam Abu Qadir, by a group of Iraqi special forces operating with British military advisers.
Ahmed Shaibani, a senior Sadr aide in the holy city of Najaf, denied that Sadr's political group or the Mahdi Army had anything to do with the kidnappings, or that the abductions were in any way connected with the killing of Abu Qadir.
"Many figures from the Sadr trend were killed by the hand of British and American forces in Iraq, and there was no reaction from the Mahdi Army because Moqtada al-Sadr always calls for calm and self-control," he said.
Abu Zahraa, an official from Sadr's office in Sadr City, and local resident Raid Abu Hasan said that dozens of armored vehicles deployed in Sadr City yesterday morning targeted three separate houses. At one, Abu Zahraa said, US forces "left a lot of damage" as they searched the rooms, yelling, "Where's the British?"
Abu Hasan said more than 20 Humvees surrounded a neighbor's house as helicopters circled overhead firing flares. One child was killed when struck by a flare whose parachute did not open, he said.
US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver would not say where US forces were focusing their search for the Britons.
Investigators were considering whether the kidnappers were members of the Mahdi Army, or were from Iraqi security services, or were impostors dressed as police, Garver said, and whether they were assisted by insiders from the Finance Ministry or Iraqi security forces.
Elsewhere in Iraq, more than 25 people were killed yesterday in mortar strikes, roadside bombings, suicide attacks and other violence, and the bodies of 25 men -- all shot to death, many handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture -- were found in different parts of the capital, according to an Iraqi Interior Ministry official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
In addition, the killings of three Iraqi journalists were reported yesterday, bringing to 14 the number of journalists killed in Iraq so far this year, and 107 since the war began in 2003, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York. In addition, 39 media support employees -- such as drivers, guards and translators -- also have been killed in the war.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
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