The military rescue of three Christian peace activists held captive for four months in Iraq set off celebrations in Chicago, London and Toronto and raised hopes in the Iraqi capital that American hostage Jill Carroll could soon be set free.
More than 250 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq since the start of the war, and at least 40 have been killed. Though many hostages have been released, military operations that have sprung captives have been a rarity. But U.S. military and diplomatic officials cautiously speculated that Thursday’s development might yield valuable information on an active “kidnapping cell.”
Carroll, a freelance journalist working for The Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped Jan. 7 after visiting the office of a prominent Sunni politician. She has appeared in three videos delivered by her kidnappers to Arab news networks, and the deadline her captors set for killing her expired nearly a month ago without word about her fate.
“My expectation and hope is that the released hostages and the associated activities, in terms of information gathered, could help us bring about her release as well,” U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said in an interview with Fox News.
However, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman, said Thursday that he had no information “that I could discuss at this time” when asked about the status of the Carroll investigation.
Big break comes
Coalition troops received a break that led to the release of the three Christian peace workers. Just before dawn Thursday, a man who was taken into custody late the night before offered a valuable tip under interrogation: He knew the exact location where three kidnapped men working with the Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams were being hidden.
Hours later and without firing a shot, U.S. and British troops swarmed a house west of Baghdad and found the hostages sitting in a room shackled and without a captor in sight.
The release of James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, both of Canada, and Norman Kember, 74, of Britain provided a fleeting moment of good news on yet another day of violence in Iraq that left at least 56 dead.
The peace activists were abducted Nov. 26 along with their American colleague Tom Fox. The Virginia man’s bullet-riddled body was found in a rural area two weeks ago. A previously unknown group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigades claimed responsibility for the abductions.
For the friends and family of the men released from captivity, the joy was tinged by the sadness of Fox’s murder.
“We have longed for the day when all four men would be released together,” Carol Rose, director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, told reporters in Chicago. “Our gladness today is made bittersweet by the fact that Tom is not alive to join in the celebration.”
The peace activists released Thursday are devoted pacifists and part of an organization that opposes the presence of foreign troops in Iraq. Christian Peacemakers has headquarters in Chicago and Toronto.
Members of the group, which has done work in Fallujah, Najaf and Karbala as well as Baghdad, had been investigating allegations of detainee abuse by coalition forces and roamed streets that few Westerners would be willing to walk without weapons or a security detail.
The three former captives were examined in a military hospital in Iraq on Thursday and appeared to be in good health. Although they had lost some weight, there were no signs they had been tortured, the peace group reported.
Rose said her organization was happy there was no violence during the rescue. In a statement written before his death, Fox said he did not want anyone to exert force to rescue him if he were taken captive in Iraq.
“During these past months, we have tasted of the pain that has been the daily bread of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis,” said Rose, who added that six members of Christian Peacemaker Teams were still working in Baghdad.
The freed men were being debriefed Thursday by coalition forces and hope to rejoin their families within the next few days, Lynch said.
Timeline not clear
The announcement of the men’s release first came in London, where British Foreign Minister Jack Straw told reporters that liberating the hostages was the culmination of efforts by British and U.S. troops with help from Canadian personnel.
“It follows weeks and weeks of very careful work by military and coalition personnel in Iraq and many civilians as well,” Straw said.
But in Baghdad, Lynch said there was only about three hours between the time coalition troops learned of the hostages’ whereabouts and when the troops found them.
Lynch said coalition troops had detained two men late Wednesday night. During an interrogation about 5 a.m. Thursday, one of the men offered up the location of Kember, Loney and Sooden. By 8 a.m. Baghdad time, troops charged the home, and the three hostages were discovered.
“When we got to the house where the hostages were located, there were no kidnappers,” Lynch said. “The three individuals were there by themselves.”
The last hostage to be freed in a military operation was Douglas Wood, an Australian rescued in western Baghdad by U.S. and Iraqi forces on June 15 after 47 days in captivity.
In videos distributed by her captors, Carroll, whose translator was killed in front of her before she was spirited away by gunmen, has relayed her captors’ demands that all female Iraqi prisoners be released.
In the last tape, Carroll’s captors set a Feb. 28 deadline for the prisoners’ release, threatening to kill Carroll if they weren’t. The U.S. military has released five of nine women detainees it had in its custody since the journalist’s abduction.
The peace activist hostages also were shown in several similar videos in which their captors demanded all Iraqi detainees be released. “The violence continued Thursday with a series of bombings in Baghdad and elsewhere that left at least 56 dead.
In the deadliest attack, a suicide car bombing outside the major crimes unit in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite Karradah district killed 25, injured dozens and left a busy stretch of the often-targeted Shiite neighborhood with the familiar stains of blood and shrapnel.
A second car bomb hit a market area outside a Shiite Muslim mosque in the mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood of Shurta in southwest Baghdad. At least six people were killed and more than 20 wounded, many of them children, police said.
In a sign that sectarian tensions remain high, six dumped bodies were found in the capital and eight others were brought in by U.S. forces to a hospital in the western city of Fallujah, The Associated Press reported.
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amadhani@tribune.com
csheehan@tribune.com
