Two articles below. One is the breaking NY Times story and the second is the UK Times report:
Ny Times
8:32 PM EST
November 14, 2006
By JOHN F. BURNS and MICHAEL LUO
BAGHDAD, Nov. 14 — Gunmen dressed in Iraqi police commando uniforms and driving vehicles with interior ministry markings rounded up dozens of people inside a government building in the heart of Baghdad on Tuesday and drove off with them in one of the most brazen mass kidnappings since a wave of sectarian abductions and killings became a feature of the war. Although some Iraqi officials said as many as 150 people had been taken, the American military command put the total at 55.
Witnesses said more than 50 gunmen arrived at the Ministry of Higher Education compound at mid-morning, forced their way past a handful of guards and stormed through a four-story building, herding office workers, visitors and even a delivery boy outside at rifle point. After women were separated, the men and possibly some women were loaded aboard a fleet of more than 30 pickup trucks and two larger trucks, then driven away through heavy traffic towards mainly Shiite neighborhoods on the city’s eastern edge, officials and witnesses said.
A spokesman for the interior ministry, responsible for the police, announced on state television several hours after the abductions that orders had been issued for the arrest of several police commanders from the Karrada area in eastern Baghdad, site of the higher education ministry.
That announcement combined with other details, including accounts by one of a group of about a dozen people released by the kidnappers later on Tuesday, to suggest that the abductions may have been the latest in a series of mass kidnappings carried out by Shiite gangs and death squads operating from inside the interior ministry, or with access to its uniforms and vehicles. If Tuesday’s abductions are traced to groups operating under interior ministry cover, they seem certain to add a new level of crisis to the political tensions in Baghdad.
Recent events in the United States, including the Democrats’ mid-term election gains last week and the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have intensified American pressure on Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and the alliance of Shiite religious groups he leads to act decisively to improve his government’s performance — in effect, to show that America has an effective partner in the war, and help to head off the momentum in Washington for a withdrawal of American troops.
Action against sectarian militias and death squads, particularly those associated with the governing Shiiite parties, is top of the American priorities that have been urged on the Iraqi leader, most recently in a meeting in Baghdad on Monday with the top American military commander in the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid. Late on Tuesday, Mr. Maliki, appearing on state-run television, appeared anxious to establish that he had responded swiftly to the abductions, saying that he had ordered the defense and interior ministries to mount an intensive search for those seized.
The 56-year-old prime minister said the security sweeps had been responsible for the release of the dozen seized earlier in the day, though that did not immediately tally with the account given by a Shiite ministry official who was among those set free. The official said that he and others in his group were separated from the main body of those taken from the ministry by their kidnappers after the gunmen quizzed their captives about their identities and occupations. After being driven blindfolded to a rural area in northern Baghdad, the official said, they were abandoned and left to make their own way to safety.
The government’s swift response in ordering the arrest of police commanders in the neighborhood where Tuesday’s kidnappings occurred was a break with a pattern of inaction bordering on indifference in several earlier mass kidnappings that appeared to have been linked to Shiite death squads. While concern to show a new resolve to restive critics of the war in Washington was likely to have been a major spur, another was the sheer scale and audaciousness of Tuesday’s attack. By seizing such a large number of people from a government building, in the center of the capital, in broad daylight, the kidnappers appeared to be sending a message that they could pounce anywhere with effective impunity.
The precise number abducted from the ministry remained uncertain. In an angry, anguished address delivered on live television, Abed Thiab al-Ajili, the higher education minister and a member of the country’s largest Sunni political bloc, told parliament that 100 to 150 people had been taken, and that they included Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians. A similar figure was given by the Shiiite ministry official who was released. His figure, though, appeared to be based on a rough count of the people working in the building, rather than an accurate head count of the abducted.
The American military command, which sent troops to the site of the kidnappings, said its own investigation showed that the number of men taken was about 55. It also said that there were indications that the kidnap victims had been taken to the Baladiyat district in eastern Baghdad, about three miles from the building where they were seized. Baladiyat is a predominantly Shiite neighborhood on the southern fringe of Sadr City, the teeming Shiite district that is the base for many of the Shiite kidnap gangs and death squads that have terrorized Sunnis in retaliation for insurgent attacks that gathered pace earlier this year.
The fact that Tuesday’s kidnappers took captives from a wide cross-section of Iraq’s cultural and religious groups created some confusion about the motives for the abductions, though a similar pattern has been set in many previous kidnappings. Sectarian gunmen, mostly Shiites and Sunnis, commonly swoop on large groups of people, then release captives from their own group, while holding others for ransom, or, more often, torturing and killing them before abandoning their bodies on vacant lots or roadsides or dumping them in rivers and sewage canals. Sunnis have been the perpetrators as often as Shiites, though it has been the Shiite attacks that have drawn special outrage, because of the widespread suspicion of government complicity, or at least acquiescence.
In his speech to parliament, Mr. Ajili, the higher education minister, skirted the question of whether the kidnapping was motivated by sectarian hatred. Sunni Arab leaders have long said the Shiite leaders who have headed two governments in the past 18 months have connived, or turned a blind eye, as Shiite militiamen have infiltrated the government’s American-trained security forces, then formed death squads that have kidnapped and assassinated Sunnis.
Shiite leaders, while not defending the death squads, say that Shiites endured two years of mass killings by Sunni insurgents who bombed Shiite markets, mosques and other communal targets before Shiite militants began to strike back with widespread killings of their own last year.
But Mr. Ajili suggested that the Maliki government was incompetent, if not complicit, in the abductions from his ministry. He said he had repeatedly asked the government for additional security to protect the ministry and members of the university community, who have been favorite targets for assassination since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
According to a tally kept by the Associated Press, more than 150 educators have been killed, and thousands of others have fled the country. “I told the M.O.I. and M.O.D. if you can’t protect the universities, give me 800 recruits, and I will do this mission,” Mr. Ajili said, referring to the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense. “But they rejected the idea.”
Shiite leaders have often said that kidnappers who have been linked to the interior ministry have in fact been criminal thugs, or even Sunni insurgents, who have acquired the military-style uniforms used in Tuesday’s attack, and many others, from street markets where they are widely available. Basil al-Khateed, a spokesman for the higher education ministry, noting that the employees taken captive were from different ethnic and religious groups, counseled against any hasty conclusions. “It’s not clear if this kidnapping was sectarian or not,” he said.
But the Shiite official who was among those released by the gunmen gave an account that appeared to leave little doubt that the abductors came from the area of eastern Baghdad that is heavily Shiite. He said the gunmen, having blindfolded their captives, yelled at motorists to clear the road as they headed east through the traffic from the ministry building, and crossed the Canal expressway. Beyond the expressway, in northeast Baghdad, lies Sadr City, the main stronghold of Shiiite militia groups, and to the south of it, near the bombed-out ruins of the United Nations building, one of the first targets of Sunni insurgent attacks in 2003, the district of Baladiyat. Wasteland between Baladiyat and Sadr City has sometimes been used to dump bodies of kidnap victims.
The official said the gunmen had taken their captives into a large hall with a concrete floor, then begun to quiz each of the men about their identities. They were continuously shouting and menacing the captives with their weapons, he said. “They split us into two groups,” he said. “The first group, they said, ‘We will release you’. The second group, ‘We will keep you for additional investigation.’ They put me in the group that would be released. When they said that, I thought, ‘No, they will kill me. I was sure they would kill me. They were shouting, ‘We will kill everyone who doesn’t listen to us.’ ”
But the gunmen put him and the others in his group back onto the pickup trucks, and drove them elsewhere, the official said. There, he said, they were told to sit on the ground and not to move, and warned that anyone removing a blindfold would be killed. But after ten minutes of silence, he said, one of the men in the group mustered the courage to clear his eyes, and told the others they were safe. They had been left in a rural area on the northern side of Baghdad, known as Sadr al-Canal. “We don’t know why they took us, and why they released us,” the official said. “It’s a terrorist operation with a big criminal ring that planned this.”
Elsewhere on Tuesday, a car bomb exploded near a busy market in the capital, killing ten people and injuring 25 others, an Interior Ministry official said. Late Monday and into Tuesday, clashes erupted between members of the Mahdi Army militia, who claim loyalty to radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and American troops, in Shuala neighborhood, leaving six civilians dead and 13 injuried, an Interior Ministry official said.
Police found 25 bodies dumped across the city on Tuesday, the official said.
The Times November 15, 2006
Iraqis left stunned by mass kidnapping
From Ned Parker in Baghdad
GUNMEN dressed in police uniforms seized scores of hostages from an Education Ministry building yesterday in one of the most audacious raids seen in a city where mass kidnappings have become routine.
In a chillingly efficient raid, about 20 armed men stormed the ministry’s scientific research institute in the usually peaceful suburb of Karrada, brushing aside five armed guards.
Abed Theyab, the Higher Education Minister, first reported that up to 130 people were taken. Later, the office of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, said that 45 to 50 people had been taken.
Late last night, state television, quoting an Interior Ministry spokesman, reported that most of the hostages had been freed in operations by security forces in Baghdad.
It took the gang, shouting: “Separate the women from the men”, between 10 and 15 minutes to seize and drive off with their prisoners in a heavily armed convoy.
Alaa Makki, head of the Iraqi parliament’s education committee, stunned the elected body with the news and demanded that the Prime Minister and his security chiefs take action.
He called the abductions a national catastrophe. They came on a day when at least 82 Iraqis were reported killed in violence across the country.
The gunmen had a list of names and talked their way into the compound, identifying themselves as representatives of the Government’s anticorruption body making a security check for a planned visit by a US diplomat, Mr Makki said.
Those seized included the deputy general directors of the research scholarships and cultural relations directorate, which organises overseas placements for Iraqi academics, other employees and visitors.
It was not clear if the kidnappers targeted one religious group, as is often the case, or whether the attack was aimed at the country’s dwindling professional class. A university dean and a prominent Sunni geologist have been murdered in the past month, bringing the death toll for academics to at least 155 since 2003.
A government spokesman said that the kidnapping was the work of militiamen who had infiltrated the Interior Ministry and were carrying out “organised” killings.
The higher education ministry is controlled by the National Concord Front, the Sunni Arab faction in Iraq’s Shia-led national unity Government. Authorities said that they suspected a sectarian motive.
The Interior Ministry has been accused of harbouring criminal gangs and Shia militias that target the country’s Sunni minority. Major-General Abdel Karim Khalaf, the Interior Ministry’s spokesman, said that five police commanders were arrested after the kidnapping.
There have been a series of high-profile kidnappings since March, when 50 employees of a Sunni-owned security firm were abducted by men in police uniforms.
Survivors and witnesses gave terrifying accounts. A female employee, who was freed by her captors, told The Times that the kidnappers pushed all the women into a room away from the men and took their phones.
“The office manager asked them, ‘Who are you? Tell us’, and they hit him with a Kalashnikov and told everyone to shut up,” she said.
The women then watched as their male colleagues were herded out to the abductors’ vehicles, she said.
Abu Saif, 35, a guard at the neighbouring passport office, said he watched the abductors pull up in a convoy of 17 to 20 cars, including 6 Chevrolet pick-up trucks, with mounted PKC machineguns.
“They were shooting in the air, telling people to get to the side of the road. Then I saw them enter the compound,” he added.
Another witness said that the men were driving police commando vehicles and wearing blue and grey uniforms.
Hours after the abduction, a dozen angry relatives yelled at the security guards who stood outside the building’s gate and protective blast walls. They asked why the guards had not put up a fight.
One guard answered: “It was an official convoy. They had Interior Ministry vehicles.” The relatives surrounded the blast walls sealing off the compound and the guards yelled for the relatives to leave. “Move, move,” they shouted.
One man searching for a relative shouted back: “I wish someone would blow himself up. It’s better to die than to live in this dirty country. Even God would not accept that our sons and brothers are kidnapped in broad daylight.”
In other violence, at least 21 people were killed by a car bomb near the Shia area of Sadr City and 31 in clashes in the western city of Ramadi.
The abductions came just hours after a US assault on the northwest Baghdad Shia district of Shuala that drew strong condemnation from Shia members of parliament. At least six people died in the clashes, security officials said. Shuala and Sadr City are strongholds of the radical antiAmerican Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, sponsor of the al-Mahdi Army.
The kidnapping came a day after General John Abizaid, head of the US Central Command, met Mr al-Maliki to discuss what Iraqi forces were going to do to tame Sunni insurgents and Shia militias.
Mr al-Maliki said the kidnapping was the product of a struggle for power among armed groups. “What is happening is not terrorism, but the result of disagreements and conflict between militias belonging to this side or that,” he said.
One university student said that the kidnapping grew from fights on campuses between groups who support Shia militias and Sunni insurgents.
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