Kidnappings hard to trace, hard to stop

By Nicholas Blanford
The Christian Science Monitor

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The call for a fatwa comes amid growing suspicion that kidnappers are selling their foreign hostages to militant Islamic groups, making it almost impossible to trace them.

But coalition forces had a rare breakthrough yesterday, rescuing three Italian security guards and a Polish contractor. All four hostages were said to be in good health and there were no casualties during the rescue.

The Italians were kidnapped April 12, along with a fourth colleague who was later executed. The Pole was abducted last week.

It was the first known military operation aimed at rescuing civilian hostages since insurgents began targeting foreigners for kidnapping in mid-April.

A U.S. soldier and two American civilians remain missing since an April 9 attack on a fuel convoy.

The soldier, Pfc. Keith Maupin of Batavia, Ohio, was last seen in an April 16 videotape. The civilians — William Bradley of Chesterfield, N.H., and Timothy Bell of Mobile, Ala. — have not been seen since the attack. Both were truck drivers for the Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

No signs of kidnap letup

About 20 foreigners are being held hostage in Iraq and, according to Andrew White, canon of Coventry Cathedral in England and director of the International Center for Reconciliation, abductions show little sign of ending.

"Our information gathering makes us quite certain that these groups are handing on their hostages," he said.

White, also an adviser to the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, believes that the kidnappings are becoming more organized and structured.
 
"If lightweights have hostages, they know they can sell them on to al-Qaida-type groups," he says. "This will really complicate things for us because these groups have little respect even for the Islamic authorities."

Last week, several mortar rounds targeted the Italian Embassy in Baghdad, killing two passers-by. A day earlier, a videotape of the three Italian hostages was aired on the Arabic Al-Jazeera TV station. Also last week, two Italian diplomats were wounded in Baghdad in an unreported attack.

White says that the incidents were timed to coincide with the visit to Italy by President Bush. "This orchestrated method of targeting the Italians when Bush goes to Italy demonstrates that there's a highly skilled operator behind what's happening," he says.

Up to 40 foreigners were kidnapped during a spate of abductions in early April when U.S. forces laid siege to the Sunni flash-point town of Fallujah and fought a Shiite uprising in the south. Several hostages were executed, including Nicholas Berg, a U.S. engineer whose videotaped decapitation, U.S. authorities believe, was carried out by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian Islamic militant blamed for much of the violence in Iraq.

Although most of the hostages subsequently were released, the kidnappings have continued at a steady rate. In the past week alone, three foreigners have been snatched: a Turk, an Egyptian and the Pole freed yesterday.

Little success in risky effort

A regular visitor to Iraq for seven years and an experienced troubleshooter in the Middle East, White is using his relationships with key Sunni and Shiite clerics in the hope that they can persuade kidnappers to free their hostages.

But his team has only had one success so far, winning the release of Nabil Razouk, an Israeli-Arab from East Jerusalem who worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development and was kidnapped April 7.

Hunting for hostages in Iraq is proving a hazardous endeavor. The British clergyman has received death threats, and some of the clerics assisting him have been scared off. Sheikh Abdel-Qader al-Anni, a prominent Sunni cleric who was helping White, went into hiding after his home was damaged in a bomb blast last month. Another senior Sunni cleric, Sheikh Abdel-Latif Humayem, who was close to Saddam Hussein, is staying in Amman, Jordan, fearing he will be killed if he returns to Iraq. White had hoped that Sheikh Humayem would issue the joint fatwa on behalf of the Sunni community.

"This is interfaith relations at the cutting edge," he says. "This isn't a case of nice people talking to other nice people and eating cucumber sandwiches in suburbia. These people are taking risks."

Most of the kidnappings occur in the Sunni triangle, especially between Baghdad and Ramadi, 60 miles west of the capital, and in the belt south of Baghdad containing the towns of Yussefiyeh, Mahmoudiyeh and Latifiyeh.

While the kidnappers in those areas are almost certainly Sunni militants, abductions have also taken place in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, the scene of fierce fighting in recent weeks between U.S. troops and the al-Mahdi Army, loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

The kidnappings have echoes of the hostage crisis in the mid-1980s in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, when dozens of foreigners were abducted by Iran-backed Shiite militants and, in some cases, held for several years.