BAGHDAD/ISTANBUL, 11 June 2004 — Iraqis are holding seven Turks hostage and demanding Turkish companies leave Iraq, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official said yesterday as the first heavy fighting between Iraqi police and Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr’s militia killed six people yesterday after a UN resolution failed to end diplomatic discord over Iraq or brewing ethnic tension in the country.
Dubai-based Al Arabiya television aired videotape showing what it said were four of the seven Turkish hostages. Masked men, armed with automatic rifles, stood behind the hostages. “It appears seven people have been taken hostage. We don’t have any concrete information on their identities,” the Turkish official said. “They may have been bringing goods and providing logistical support for American companies in Iraq,” he said, adding it was unclear when and where the men had been abducted.
The Turkish ambassador in Baghdad was working for the men’s release, the official said. Dozens of foreign workers have been taken hostage by armed Iraqi groups who are battling the US-led presence in Iraq. An Iraqi group is still holding Turkish truck driver Bulent Yanik and an Egyptian hostage and has threatened to kill them.
Meanwhile, fighting continued in Baghdad. After battling US troops for two months, Sadr’s Mehdi Army turned on local police in Najaf as they began rounding up militia in the streets and threatened to evict them from the Imam Ali Mosque.
Among the dead were a police officer, three militiamen and two civilians. Another 29 people were wounded, including 10 policemen and two children, according to Najaf General Hospital.
The shooting, which began overnight and continued into last evening, occurred less than a week after Iraqi police began patrolling the streets of Najaf under a US a truce with the Mehdi Army.
The deal saw Sadr’s men agree to withdraw from Najaf and the adjacent town of Kufa, which they seized in April as part of a bigger uprising across central and southern Iraq. Hundreds of militiamen died in the clashes.
But they have clung to positions around the mosque and the city’s cemetery, drawing a warning earlier this week from police chief Ghaleb Al-Jazariy to leave or face fire.
The clashes came as tension rose between the Shiite majority and Kurds over Tuesday’s UN resolution on Iraq, which spells out the country’s legal and political framework after the return of sovereignty on June 30.
The text does not even mention the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), which guarantees Kurdish rights in a federal, post-occupation Iraq.
Iraq’s two main Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, have threatened to pull all Kurdish ministers out of the government if the TAL were changed after June 30.
Leading Sunni religious scholars, meanwhile, complained that the UN blueprint represented several “dangers,” as it offered no clear date for the end of the occupation and endorsed sending multinational forces by the occupying powers.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi yesterday blamed insurgents and saboteurs for hindering Iraq reconstruction. In the past seven months alone, saboteurs have committed 130 attacks on oil facilities, causing losses of more than $200 million, Allawi said in Baghdad.
Further acts of sabotage have done ecological damage to agriculture, polluted water supplies and undermined electricity production, he added.
In many cases, saboteurs have knowingly sought targets near canals or important waterways in order to contaminate the country’s drinking water, Allawi said. He said groups attempting to destroy Iraq’s infrastructure were not freedom fighters but terrorists and foreign agents who begrudged Iraqis their new freedom.
Calling on all Iraqis to be vigilant, Allawi said: “Every dollar earned through oil income will go directly to the good of the reconstruction of our country.”
