Iraq Clampdown Appears Ineffective

Iraqi officials were trying Thursday to piece together how, and why, gunmen abducted scores of factory workers a day earlier, the second mass kidnapping this month.

The abduction Wednesday afternoon in Taji was as brazen an act as one less than three weeks ago when men wearing police uniforms descended on a Baghdad bus depot and kidnapped about 50 people, dragging them kicking and screaming off buses and out of shops.

The kidnappings sent a reminder that the violence in this country, and particularly the capital, has not been curbed by a major security clampdown put in place June 14 with much fanfare. In Wednesday’s incident, about 40 gunmen in mini-buses descended on a metal-door factory in Taji, about 20 miles north of Baghdad.

They kidnapped workers and their relatives who were getting on company buses to be driven to their homes in the poor Shiite Muslim neighborhoods of north and east Baghdad.

A short time later, the kidnappers released some of the abductees, mostly women and children, but kept about 50. An additional 17 hostages were released Thursday.

One of those released, a Shiite Muslim, told the Associated Press that the prisoners were grouped according to sect, and that he was released because he had forged papers identifying him as a Sunni Muslim. He said two captives were killed while trying to escape.

In the June 5 incident, which had no discernible sectarian motive, men wearing police uniforms blocked streets near a busy public transport area in downtown Baghdad and abducted about 50 Iraqis, witnesses said.

The daytime raid took place less than a mile from the fortified Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and many U.S. military operations are based. About 15 of the detainees were released the next day, but the fate of the others is not known.

In March, dozens of men wearing commando uniforms stormed the offices of Al Rawafid security company, seizing about 50 employees. The abductees have not been heard from and the kidnappers have not been identified.

In other violence, the motorcade of the Diyala governor was hit Thursday by a roadside bomb en route to the provincial capital, Baqubah, from Baghdad. Two bodyguards were killed, police and hospital officials said.

Gov. Raad Mawla, who was critically injured when his car flipped over, and a bodyguard were being treated at a nearby U.S. military hospital.

Witnesses said the governor’s vehicle was so badly damaged in the explosion that initially few believed he had survived.

In the north, in the ethnically divided oil city of Kirkuk, two traffic police officers were killed in a drive-by shooting in a mostly Arab neighborhood.

In the nearby Sunni Arab town of Hawija, a civilian was fatally shot by unknown assailants, police said.

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Special correspondents in Kirkuk and Taji contributed to this report.