Six More Foreigners Are Kidnapped in Iraq

When the Philippine government secured the release of one of its citizens Tuesday by withdrawing its troops from Iraq ahead of schedule, Iraqi and U.S. officials expressed concern that the concession could encourage further political kidnappings.

One day later, Iraq faced a new foreign hostage crisis.

A militant group calling itself the “Holders of the Black Banners” announced the abduction of six foreign truck drivers Wednesday, threatening to execute them one by one if the Kuwaiti company they work for didn’t pull out of Iraq.

The new kidnappings capped a day of violence around Iraq that left at least five Iraqi civilians and one U.S. soldier dead. There also were conflicting reports about whether a U.S. helicopter was shot down west of Baghdad.

A mortar attack on a Baghdad hospital killed two of the Iraqis and injured four more. A car bomb in a northeast Baghdad neighborhood killed three people and injured five, and a roadside bomb attack shortly after midnight Tuesday in Duluiyah north of the capital killed a soldier with the 1st Infantry Division and wounded six others.

The new hostages, three Indians, two Kenyans and an Egyptian, apparently are truck drivers for the same Kuwaiti-owned firm. None of their three countries of origin has troops in Iraq as part of the U.S.-led forces. Earlier in the week, a kidnapped Egyptian truck driver was released after the Saudi firm he worked for agreed to leave Iraq.

In a video broadcast Wednesday on the Al Arabiya satellite news channel, the six new hostages stand in the background behind three seated masked men. Two of those men brandish assault rifles, while the third reads a statement threatening to kill one hostage every 72 hours, beginning Saturday night, if the Kuwaiti company doesn’t withdraw its personnel from Iraq and close its Baghdad office.

The Egyptian abductee identifies himself as Mohammed Ali Sennad and holds up a piece of paper with what appears to be a list of names and the words “Universal Service” handwritten across the top. Sennad pleads with his employers to “handle this and send us home to our countries.”

Iraq has witnessed a spate of kidnappings of foreigners in recent months. A South Korean national and a Bulgarian were beheaded last month. The fate of a second Bulgarian hostage remained unknown.

A new statement posted on the Internet by a group calling itself the European wing of Al Qaeda threatened the Bulgarian and Polish governments with attacks if they didn’t pull their soldiers out of Iraq, Associated Press reported.

The Bulgarian government had refused to withdraw its 480 troops from Iraq to spare the lives of the two Bulgarian hostages, and Polish Deputy Defense Minister Janusz Zemke said Wednesday that withdrawing his nation’s soldiers would only encourage terrorism.

Another militant group this week demanded the withdrawal of Japan’s 500-member peacekeeping contingent from Iraq. A Japanese Foreign Ministry official Wednesday shrugged off the threat.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, spokesman for the U.S.-led forces in Iraq, said Wednesday that insurgents seemed to have shifted tactics since the June 28 transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government. The new emphasis, he said, was on larger-scale attacks such as Monday’s truck bombing outside a Baghdad police station, which killed nine people and hurt 56 -- and on hostage taking.

“Their goal is to breed fear and terror into the population. You can’t do that with small-scale attacks,” he said. “Hostage taking has no other function than to draw attention.”

The mortar attack Wednesday destroyed two rooms of the Specialized Surgical Hospital in central Baghdad. The hospital is part of a cluster of facilities along the eastern bank of the Tigris River known as Medical City.

The blast tore through two adjacent rooms in the hospital’s seventh-floor orthopedic surgery unit, shattering windows, scattering beds and blowing a 3-foot hole in the wall.

One room was empty at the time for routine sterilization. The casualties were in the second room, which was packed with at least eight people -- patients in all four beds, each with a relative in attendance.

Syringes and ampoules lay scattered in a mixture of blood and ash amid the remnants of a peaceful convalescence: a folded Arabic newspaper sat on a broken nightstand and a bag of grapes lay on the windowsill coated in soot.

Doctors and patients said they believed that the hospital was deliberately targeted. The round hit one floor above a special ward run by the Italian Red Cross that specializes in burn victims.

Three mortar rounds were launched at the hospital, but the first two shells landed off target.

“For the third one, they adjusted their aim,” said Ali Mekki, 80, who was recovering from a dislocated hip when the blast struck. “The world started raining on me, and then I couldn’t see anything.”

Mekki said his son had been standing at his bedside. Doctors hadn’t yet told him that his son was among the dead.

In Ramadi, a stronghold of anti-U.S. sentiment west of Baghdad, a midafternoon skirmish between insurgents and Marines left five Iraqis injured. Iraqi police officer Ali Hammadi said the battle started about 3 p.m. with an attack on an American convoy.

“The insurgents attacked a transport vehicle and completely destroyed it. Then they were engaged by helicopters, which opened fire, injuring five civilians and damaging several homes, vehicles and stores,” he said.

Another police officer, 1st Lt. Ahmed Alwan, said he saw an American helicopter crash west of Ramadi after being hit by a surface-to-air missile. U.S. spokesman Lessel issued a statement that no helicopters had been shot down and that all U.S. aircraft in the area had been accounted for.

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Abduction victims Kidnappers in Iraq have taken 67 hostages from 20 nations. Their fate:

Country Freed Missing Dead Bulgaria 0 1 1 Canada 2 1 0 China 7 0 0 Czech 3 0 0 Republic Egypt 2 1 0 France 1 0 0 India 0 3 0 Israel 1 0 0 Italy 3 0 1 Japan 5 0 0 Jordan 0 1 0 Kenya 0 2 0 Lebanon 4 0 1 Pakistan 1 0 0 Philippines 1 0 0 Poland 2 0 0 Russia 2 0 0 South Korea 0 0 1 Turkey 13 0 0 United States 3 2 2

Source: Associated Press