Kidnappers reap rewards of US occupation of Iraq

By PATRICK COCKBURN

So many of my relatives have been kidnapped that I fear I am going to be next," says Qasim Sabty, a painter and owner of the Hewar Art Gallery in Baghdad. He mentions the name of another gallery owner who paid kidnappers US$100,000 ($159,000) for the return of her grandson.

Fear of kidnapping is pervasive in Baghdad. Sabty is not a particularly wealthy man but kidnapping comes at the top of his list of reasons why he feels insecure. "You feel lucky if your son goes to school in the morning and comes back safe in the evening," he said.

Kidnapping is one of the few growth industries in Iraq since the US invasion. It is now so common that new words have been added to Iraqi thieves' slang. A kidnap victim is called "al-tali" or "the sheep", and the person who identifies a potential target to kidnappers is called "al-alaas".

Suicide bombs and battles between US troops and the resistance get the attention of the outside world but the chronic sense of insecurity felt by Iraq is almost equally the result of the impact of violent crime.

At the headquarters of the Iraqi police serious crime organisation, Lieutenant Colonel Farouk Mahmoud, deputy head of the 40-member kidnap squad, explains that after the looting of Baghdad last year, local criminals turned to kidnapping as highly profitable and almost risk-free. "Their favourite targets are doctors and businessmen," he said.

Mahmoud notes, "We find that in 95 per cent of cases the kidnappers have been tipped off by somebody close to the victim, such as a friend or an assistant."

Usually, the family of the hostage is told to dial a certain telephone or Thuraya satellite phone number.

The failure of the US military police to help the Iraqi police to track the source of a Thuraya call is a major source of complaint among the officers of the kidnap squad.

"They only gave us the information once," says Mahmoud. "We found the house where the kidnappers were immediately, though the victim, a doctor for whom $10,000 [$16,000] was being asked, had been killed already."

The kidnap squad does have its successes. One day, an informer told Major Abdel Karim to look in a house beside a sewage treatment plant in Salman Pak, southeast of Baghdad.

"When we broke into a room upstairs we found two men bound and gagged," said Mahmoud. "There was a whole family of kidnappers who owned a farm."

He shows a photograph of the two victims, one elderly with white hair and the other dark and much younger, surrounded by the triumphant officers of the police kidnap squad.

It is not known how many kidnaps take place each month. Many are never reported to the police. One man came to Mahmoud and asked if he had equipment to track a Thuraya telephone call and, on hearing he did not, said, "In that case I will handle this kidnapping myself."

Asked how an Iraqi businessman should try to avoid being kidnapped, Mahmoud says brightly, to laughter from other officers, "Go abroad!"

If this is not possible, they should conceal the fact that they have money, watch those who work for them and vary their routine.

Not surprisingly, many wealthy Iraqis have decided the safest course is to move with their families to Jordan.

Being poor in Iraq is no defence against crime. In the heart of Baghdad, within sight of the heavily fortified Green Zone where the Coalition Provisional Authority has its headquarters, buses are robbed by street gangs every day.

Ali Abdul Jabber, a bus driver at the al-Nasser bus terminal, has watched his passengers being robbed three times. "On the last occasion the thieves jumped on board because the doors have to be open in this hot weather," Jabber said.

"Two of them stood guard at the back while two others walked down the bus looking in people's bags and stealing money and jewellery.

"The whole experience left me shaking, not with fear but with anger. I tried not to glance back at them in case they might think I could identify them, and kill me. When they saw me glancing at them in the mirror they told me to look away," Jabber said.

Nobody went to the police. "The passengers didn't even discuss it among themselves because this sort of thing is so much part of daily life in Baghdad," he said. He thought most of them believed he was in league with the gang.

The dangerous anarchy of everyday life is one reason Iraqis are so hostile to the occupation. Even the kidnap squad officers did not have a good word to say for it.

Iraqi criminals are meanwhile in a confident mood. In Nassariyah last week a gang stole a truck with four cows in it. They demanded a ransom of one million dinars ($1000) but added that the cows were voracious eaters and their owner would have to pay another 50,000 dinars ($500) for food they had eaten.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq