3 Turks Taken Hostage in Iraq

Followers of the United States’ “No. 1 target” in Iraq announced Saturday that they had kidnapped three Turkish contractors and threatened to behead them, even as President Bush was flying to Turkey for a NATO summit. The abductions came as 54 people were killed in insurgent attacks across Iraq.

The seizure of the three Turkish civilian contractors by loyalists of Jordanian-born fugitive Abu Musab Zarqawi appeared aimed at undermining Bush during his meeting in Istanbul with allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The hostage-taking cast a pall over Bush’s diplomatic mission to heal rifts with allies that were opened by the Iraq war. As Bush landed Saturday night in the Turkish capital, Ankara, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul failed to greet him at the airport as scheduled, apparently because he was dealing with the hostage crisis.

White House officials offered no immediate comment on the incident.

Turkey, host of the two-day summit that will begin Monday, is not a member of the multinational force that invaded Iraq 15 months ago. The U.S.-led force has struggled against a fierce and intensifying insurgency that has killed hundreds of U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis. Civilian contractors also have been targeted by the insurgents, and two of them have been beheaded.

Arab satellite TV broadcasts showed the three Turks kneeling at gunpoint at the feet of their masked captors, holding up identity documents for the camera. The militants pointed their guns at the captives’ heads while one read an ultimatum demanding that Turks doing business with the U.S.-led occupiers of Iraq withdraw within 72 hours or the three would be killed.

The same group claimed responsibility for the beheading last week of a South Korean hostage, a civilian interpreter, despite his desperate, televised pleas that his life be spared.

Most Turks in Iraq are engaged in private trade, primarily trucking in gasoline as extremists continue to sabotage Iraqi pipelines and refineries.

An overwhelming majority of Turks are opposed to the U.S.-led occupation. On Saturday, police battled scores of protesters in Ankara’s central Kizilay Square before Bush’s arrival. Two days earlier, four people were killed in bombings in Ankara and Istanbul. An obscure Marxist-Leninist group claimed responsibility for the attacks.

In Iraq, coalition military leaders have been warning for weeks that foreign and Iraqi insurgents fighting the occupation would intensify their attacks ahead of a scheduled transfer of sovereignty Wednesday to an interim Iraqi government.

Holdout supporters of ousted President Saddam Hussein and militant Islamic groups from Iraq and abroad have vowed to defeat U.S.-led forces and Washington’s handpicked government to thwart further American influence in the region.

Word of the Turks’ abduction reached Baghdad little more than an hour after Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, reminded Iraqis of a $10-million bounty on Zarqawi’s head and urged them to turn him in, whether for reasons of patriotism, security or personal enrichment.

Branding Zarqawi “the No. 1 target” in a campaign to quell the escalating violence, Kimmitt said coalition forces had stepped up their hunt for him. Zarqawi and his network have claimed responsibility for many of the recent killings, including Thursday’s coordinated attacks that left more than 100 dead, all but three of them Iraqis.

The mounting bloodshed has compelled some foes of the occupation, including the radical militia headed by Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, to step back from insurgent actions that they feel besmirch the name of Islam.

In Hillah, a usually placid and predominantly Shiite city 60 miles south of Baghdad, two car bombs detonated near a mosque shortly after nightfall Saturday, killing 40 people and injuring 22 others, said a coalition spokesman.

In the first of a series of attacks in Baqubah, north of Baghdad, insurgents believed to be under Zarqawi’s command tried to enter a government building but were gunned down by guards of the Iraqi Islamic Party.

One of the four slain attackers was found to be wearing a vest rigged with explosives.

Masked gunmen also attacked the Baqubah offices of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, killing three inside the Shiite political party’s building.

Another group of insurgents seized the offices of the Iraqi National Accord -- the regional branch of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s party -- and blew them up after driving out the occupants.

Two insurgents died in an attack on a police station, the U.S. military said.

Baqubah resident Saad Jawad said, “They are attacking us to prevent us from being in the field with other people of Iraq to rebuild our country and to impede our participation in the democratic process.”

In the northern city of Irbil, two insurgents in a taxi laden with explosives maneuvered through heavy traffic to trap a government car carrying the regional Culture minister.

The men walked away before detonating the car bomb by remote. The minister, Mahmoud Mohammed, was among 15 people injured, and one of his bodyguards was killed, witnesses and local authorities reported.

Two Iraqi civil defense guards and a policeman were killed by insurgents in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

A U.S. soldier died of wounds early in the day after gunmen ambushed a patrol in central Baghdad overnight, coalition officials reported. No identity was released.

Coalition leaders acknowledge that the insurgency is broader, more sophisticated and more coordinated than previously believed, but they insist that the militants are a small minority that will lose their latitude to wage a holy war here once Iraqis regain control over their affairs.

Referring to the increasing similarities among insurgent tactics across a broad swath of Iraq, Kimmitt said coalition military analysts “are seeing simultaneous operations by organizations once thought to be separate.”

“It would appear that Zarqawi is responsible for a great number of the deadliest incidents in this country,” he said.

Kimmitt said the coalition’s efforts to capture Zarqawi had been complicated by his skills at disguise and evasion.

“Terrorism is a Darwinian business. The dumb ones die and the smart ones stay alive,” he said, noting that Osama bin Laden and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have eluded capture for years.

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Times staff writer Maura Reynolds in Ankara and special correspondents Abdalsalam Madani in Irbil, Faris Mehdawi in Baqubah and Amberin Zaman in Ankara contributed to this report.