French Journalists Freed After 4 Months of Captivity in Iraq

Militants released two French journalists Tuesday after holding them for four months, bringing to a happy conclusion one of the longest hostage ordeals in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

The two men were in Baghdad under protection of French authorities and were expected to arrive in Paris today, French officials said.

“I have the profound joy of announcing that Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot have been freed,” Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said in remarks on the Senate floor as legislators stood and applauded. “I want to pay homage to the courage of these two men who have suffered during these long months in difficult conditions.”

There was jubilation in France but few details in Iraq about the timing and the circumstances under which the kidnappers turned the hostages over to officials of the French Embassy in Baghdad.

The news reached French President Jacques Chirac on vacation in Morocco, where he announced he would hurry home to receive the journalists. Several of the hostages’ relatives said they first heard about the release from news reports, not from French officials who had been updating them periodically.

“It’s the most beautiful Christmas present,” Anne-Marie Chesnot, sister of the freed Radio France International journalist, said in a French TV interview. Malbrunot works for the Paris-based Le Figaro newspaper.

The abductors released a communique claiming that they had freed the two veteran Middle East correspondents after determining that the men were not spies for the U.S.-led military coalition. The communique from the group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq also cited France’s opposition to the war.

The militants expressed “appreciation for the French government’s attitude on the Iraqi question and the two French journalists’ attitude toward the Palestinian cause,” according to the text broadcast by the Al Jazeera TV channel.

After the two men were seized Aug. 20, the abductors threatened to kill them if France did not drop a new law banning religious symbols such as Islamic head scarves from public schools. But the French government refused, and the group had made no concrete public demands in recent months.

Questions persisted Tuesday about whether a ransom might have changed hands as the result of negotiations by French operatives in the underworld of Islamic extremists, Iraqi nationalists and common criminals.

In August, the Islamic Army in Iraq kidnapped and killed Enzo Baldoni, an Italian journalist and activist who had opposed the war. The Italian government is a partner in the U.S.-led coalition. The next month, another group of abductors reportedly collected a ransom from Rome in exchange for releasing two Italian women who were longtime aid workers in Iraq.

The communique’s allusions to politics and the holiday timing of the release suggest an attempt to influence public opinion in France, where the kidnappings caused particular consternation because Chirac led opposition to the Iraq war, a U.S. security expert said.

“If they had chopped their heads off, it might have hardened French public opinion,” said defense expert John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonpartisan website. “By sparing them, it would further a belief that the Americans are the problem and that if the Americans would just go home, that would solve it. I think they understand the psychology of kidnapping and how to play to it.”

The Islamic Army in Iraq, Pike said, remains shadowy compared with groups such as the Ansar al Sunna Army, which claimed responsibility for rocket attacks Tuesday on a U.S. base in Mosul. He described the abductors as Sunni nationalists who include elements of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s security forces.

“They do kidnappings,” Pike said. “Sometimes they kill them, sometimes they let them go.... Who the underlying personnel are or in terms of who they work with, there’s no paper trail.

“Part of the problem,” he added, “is we have no way of knowing if all of the kidnappings that are attributed to them are in fact attributable to a single enterprise or if there are several using this ‘nom de guerre.’ ”

In France, experts have speculated that the group is a fractious alliance of foreign Islamic extremists and Iraqi paramilitary nationalists, a fusion typical in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. That mix may have caused disputes over strategy, contributing to the length of a drama that was agonizing for France.

Chesnot, 37, and Malbrunot, 41, were headed for the Iraqi holy city of Najaf on the day of the kidnapping. Gunmen abducted them along with their Syrian driver on an often-violent stretch of highway in Latifiya, about 20 miles southwest of Baghdad.

Although the French government refused to scuttle the head-scarf ban, it deployed a diplomatic offensive among Arab allies, including intelligence services, clerics and radicals. French Muslim leaders joined in, and even critics of the ban appealed for the hostages’ release during a trip to Baghdad.

The French government was determined to negotiate a solution, a U.S. official said. In the early weeks, U.S. military officers thought they had detected the kidnappers’ hide-out and offered to attempt a commando raid, but the French quickly declined, the official said.

The French diplomatic campaign derailed in early October. A maverick French congressional deputy flew to Syria to announce that his operatives, a shady group with ties to the former Hussein government, were on the verge of freeing the journalists. His gambit fell apart and caused the hostage-takers to break off contact, French officials said.

Paris adopted a policy that one senior French official described privately as a “blackout.” Other than occasional statements that the hostages were alive, government officials said little about the efforts overseen by Gen. Phillippe Rondot, a spymaster with expertise in hostage crises in the Arab world.

Then came the U.S.-led military offensive last month against insurgents in the Iraqi city of Fallouja. U.S. troops there freed Mohammed Joundi, the journalists’ driver, and an Egyptian truck driver who described being held with Frenchmen. But neither had seen the journalists since early November.

Rotella reported from Paris and Roug from Baghdad.