BAGHDAD, 19 December 2006 — Iraqi Red Crescent aid workers suspended work in war-torn Baghdad yesterday after two dozen of their colleagues fell victim to the latest mass kidnap to shock a city plagued by sectarian violence. At least 14 Iraqis were killed in a string of bombings and shootings as new US Defense Secretary Robert Gates prepared to take office in Washington amid deepening US divisions about how to handle the crisis in Iraq.
A former Iraqi Cabinet minister, an Iraqi-US dual national who was jailed for corruption, staged an escape from jail in Baghdad’s highly fortified Green Zone, in a further sign of the rampant chaos engulfing the country. “We have frozen or stopped temporarily activities in Baghdad, but this is not affecting civilian needs. This was logical because our main staff is still kidnapped,” the Iraqi Red Crescent’s Secretary-General Mazen Abdallah said.
“We are the only organization working in all of Iraq. We don’t want to stop,” he added. In addition to the main branch targeted in the kidnapping, the Iraqi Red Crescent has closed another 40 subsidiary offices in Baghdad, affecting more than 600 staff, a large proportion of them security guards, Abdallah said.
Seventeen of more than 30 men snatched in Sunday’s brazen raid by gunmen dressed in police uniforms have been released, including three guards from the nearby Dutch Embassy and 10 Red Crescent guards and drivers, Abdallah added. But 19 Red Crescent staff are still missing following what was the second mass abduction to terrorize Baghdad in less than a week.
Meanwhile, the violence continues unchecked. In Baghdad, five people were killed and 19 wounded yesterday when a car bomb exploded in a bustling marketplace in the mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood of Saidiyah, a security source said.
Three other people were killed in separate attacks and Iraq’s disgraced former Electricity Minister Ayham Al-Samarrai escaped from a jail under joint Iraqi-US guard in Baghdad, two months after he was jailed for corruption.
The chief prosecutor in Saddam Hussein’s trial for genocide against the Kurds presented the most serious evidence to date yesterday, implicating the deposed Iraqi leader directly in chemical attacks against his Kurdish population. Munqith Al-Faroon showed the Iraqi court trying Saddam and six other former regime members about 25 documents, including some presidency letters instructing the army to use “special ammunition” — identified as “mustard gas” — to quell a Kurdish rebellion in 1987.
