BAGHDAD — Three Americans who have been missing in Iraq since Friday were probably kidnapped from a Baghdad apartment, according to security officials and local news reports. The apartment may have been the home of an Iraqi colleague who is
BAGHDAD — Three Americans who have been missing in Iraq since Friday were probably kidnapped from a Baghdad apartment, according to security officials and local news reports. The apartment may have been the home of an Iraqi colleague who is also believed to have been abducted, the officials and reports said.
News of the Americans’ disappearance emerged late Sunday, but officials said they were probably taken two days earlier in Dora, a sprawling neighborhood in the southern part of the capital that has a mixed population of Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well as some Christians. The area was once a haven for al-Qaida in Iraq, the predecessor of the Islamic State, the militant group that controls territory in northern and western Iraq. But these days, parts of the neighborhood are under the sway of powerful Shiite militias with ties to Iran.
U.S. and Iraqi officials were scrambling Monday to find the missing Americans. Officials said no group had yet come forward to take responsibility for abducting them. Kidnappings for ransom by criminal gangs are common in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, but so are politically motivated abductions.
Residents of Dora and Iraqi officials said security forces began searching for the missing Americans on Saturday morning, going door to door and searching homes in some areas.
Saad Maan, the spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command, said on Monday that the Americans were taken from a “suspicious apartment” in Dora, without elaborating.
The Americans were reported to be contractors with jobs at the Baghdad airport, though it was unclear who employed them. At least two of them had dual nationality. Saad al-Hadithi, a spokesman for Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq, said one of the abductees was an Egyptian-American, and another was an Iraqi-American.
Abductions of Westerners in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities were common in the years after the U.S. invasion in 2003, but the latest episode is believed to be the first kidnapping of an American in Iraq in nearly six years.
These cases and the apparent kidnapping of Americans are embarrassments for the Iraqi government, and could complicate the relationship between Iraq and the United States at a time when the two countries are trying to cooperate more closely in fighting the Islamic State. The latest incident also highlights the government’s lack of control over security in the capital.
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