BAGHDAD, 31 July 2004 — Bassam had barely stepped outside the gate of his Baghdad school when a man grabbed him, covered his eyes and bundled him into a getaway car. The 10-year-old was to spend the next month locked in a house by strangers who fed him only tomatoes and potatoes while kidnappers haggled with his father over a ransom for his release.
“After 10 days they called my uncle’s house and said we have Bassam and want $150,000 to return him. Don’t tell the police,” said his father Walid, sitting in the dingy living room of their home in Baghdad’s sprawling Sadr City slum. “After 20 days they brought it down to $100,000. But I didn’t have that kind of money. I am a cameraman and so is my brother. So the calls went on, threatening to kill him.”
While world attention focuses on dozens of foreigners taken hostage and sometimes executed by insurgents bent on expelling foreign troops from Iraq, ordinary Iraqis also live in fear of criminal gangs who have turned to kidnapping for money.
Walid finally talked his son’s captors down to a ransom of $5,000, sold one of the family’s two cars, and deposited the cash in a box the kidnappers had placed under a bridge in the Iraqi capital. “They told me to come alone. Bassam came home an hour later in a taxi,” said Walid, who doesn’t know who snatched his eldest child.
No one knows how many Iraqis have been kidnapped in the lawlessness that has followed last year’s US-led invasion as most families are too scared to tell a police force they feel is powerless to help them. Yet almost any Iraqi has a tale of a relative, friend or neighbor who has been kidnapped for money. Iraqis say doctors and dentists, considered relatively well off in the new Iraq, have become the victims of choice. Four other kidnap victims - two of them doctors - declined to speak to Reuters about what happened to them even when assured that their names would be withheld.
Some worried that the kidnappers would come back. Iraqis talk of kidnappers returning for more after being paid off once. Others, particularly doctors, have fled the country leading to fears of a “brain drain” when Iraq’s devastated health infrastructure needs them most. Those who can afford it have armed guards to keep robbers and kidnappers at bay.
“Anyone who has money is a target for kidnappers,” said Raad Khudeir, head of the Serious Crimes Unit which deals with abductions. “There are often informants who tip off gangs about possible victims.”
Khudeir said his unit had launched a campaign to encourage Iraqis to report abductions to the police, sometimes persuading relatives of victims to speak out on television or radio. “People used to negotiate with the kidnappers without telling the police,” he said, adding that ransoms could vary from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Now more people report cases to the police, who tell us and we can take action to capture them.”
Iraq’s interim government has cracked down in recent weeks on the violent crime gripping Baghdad, with officials saying they had netted hundreds of suspected murderers, kidnappers and robbers in a matter of days. Ordinary Iraqis have welcomed more crackdowns and tough prison terms for criminals, many veteran jailbirds pardoned by Saddam Hussein in the run up to the war in March 2003. Khudeir said the unit had cracked several kidnapping rings while the number of reported cases had declined from highs of several a day in the first few months of the year to a few a week by the end of June.
