Saturday, Sep 18, 2004

Nobody is safe, absolutely no one. That is the message behind the pandemic of kidnapping in Iraq, and it is undeniably effective.

This week's seizure of two Americans and a Briton from a rich riverside district of Baghdad and the recent kidnapping of two Italian women aid workers may have no intrinsic connection. But they are part of an emerging pattern in which political aims overlap with financial extortion, and in which Iraqis are suffering far more from kidnapping than the foreigners in their country.

For foreigners it would appear to make little difference which side of the war debate their country was on, whether their leaders committed troops to the occupation, or whether they are in Iraq as mercenaries or missionaries, reporters or construction workers. Frenchmen get taken as well as Italians, Russians and Canadians as well as Americans and Britons. Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Lebanon all opposed the war, but that did not protect their (mainly Muslim) citizens from the kidnappers, any more than the citizens of US-allied Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. Nepal, whose only part in the entire affair is the presence of an estimated 15,000 labourers in Iraq, faced the horror of seeing 12 of its nationals murdered by kidnappers in one incident.

"It is painful that the kidnappers do not differentiate between the brother and friend, and the enemy," said Jean Obeid, Lebanon's foreign minister, after a botched kidnapping last week in Baghdad that left three Lebanese nationals dead. He seems to have forgotten what went on in Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war, which Iraq is now in real danger of emulating.

Yet almost since the fall of Baghdad 18 months ago, Iraqis have had it far worse. With the collapse of the Iraqi state into lawlessness and banditry - a phenomenon that well pre-dates the emergence of resistance to the occupation - rare is the family of even modest financial substance that has not been afflicted by kidnapping for ransom. Probably even more than the dangers of the ongoing war, the hostage-taking business is causing a big outflow of middle-class Iraqis to neighbouring countries, a haemorrhage no country that needs to rebuild almost from scratch can afford.

Some of the kidnappers are plainly Sunni Islamist militants, their demands, usually for troop withdrawals, set out in communiques, or their savage revenge recorded in grisly webcasts or videotapes. Others are Ba'athists, including former (and, by some accounts, actual) policemen and army officers. Others still are simply brigands, exploiting US inability to control roads, frontiers and an increasing number of towns and cities in central and southern Iraq.

The political aim is to trigger a stampede of allied troops, businesses and Iraqi professionals to demonstrate that the occupation can provide neither peace nor reconstruction. The financial aim is equally uncomplicated.

In the same way that Washington and its allies blame much of the resistance on "foreign fighters" (despite finding barely two dozen from over 43,000 people seized in the first year after the fall of Baghdad), they assign too much responsibility for the kidnappings to individuals who are easy to demonise, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Mr Zarqawi, a Jordanian Wahhabi whose aims include a civil war to exterminate the majority Iraqi Shia, appears to have personally beheaded the US hostage Nick Berg in May. Chilling and abhorrent as this ritualised slaughter was, it - and indeed Mr Zarqawi - are but a fraction of the problem. That is not least because, as in the Lebanon war, factional chaos and lawlessness lead to multiple but scarcely visible elisions between the politics and the business of kidnapping, creating a market where hostages taken for money are sold on to politico-religious groups. This seems to be the direction Iraqi kidnapping is taking, and it is deeply sinister.

In 1986 in Beirut, for example, three teachers at the American University, two British and one American, were kidnapped and sold on. They were eventually bought by a pro-Libyan group and "executed" in revenge for that year's US air strikes on Tripoli.

France is clearly aware of the Lebanese experience in its approach to trying to secure the release of two French journalists seized last month. It despatched General Philippe Rondot, an experienced Arabist intelligence chief and veteran of the Lebanese hostage crisis, to find who was holding the journalists; it appears, like others, to be prepared to pay for their freedom; and it has launched a diplomatic offensive, drawing support from Arab and western capitals, militant groups and figures such as Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Moqtada al-Sadr, as well as mainstream Muslim clerics.

Paying ransom deepens the hostage market, while headline diplomacy aggrandises the kidnappers and encourages their demands. There is a gathering debate among news organisations about whether publicity is exacerbating the kidnapping problem. But fatwas, religious edicts, have force in the Muslim world.

There are no good options or easy solutions to the kidnapping plague, just as there are none for the chaos of post-war Iraq. But France's ability to mobilise Arab and Muslim opinion, alongside the debate on how much to publicise hostage seizures, is suggestive. If the religious authorities of Iraq and the region were to issue fatwas prohibiting kidnapping, one contractor who withdrew from Iraq after ransoming drivers said this week, many would return. More fatwas and fewer headlines are not much to go on, but not much else seems to be working.

The writer is a member of the FT's editorial comment team

By DAVID GARDNER

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