Iraq kidnappers thrive in business of terror

By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

July 2004

BAGHDAD - William I. broke out in a cold sweat when his hysterical wife phoned to tell him that their 1-1/2-year-old son had been grabbed from their front door and was being held for ransom.
"They came by car to my house. My baby was near the door, and they snatched him and told my wife, 'Don't shout or I will shoot you,' and they took my kid and went," said William, sitting in the
empty bar of the Baghdad hotel where he works.

"Then they phoned me at home, I don't know how they knew the number, and said: 'If you give us money, maybe we will return your boy.'" The kidnappers wanted $50,000 - a fortune in
Iraq, where the monthly salary for a hotel employee who speaks English and Arabic, like William, is $200 - tops.
Kidnapping has turned into a cottage industry for gangsters and terrorists, terrifying Iraqis already traumatized by politically motivated car bombs, mortar fire and drive-by shootings.
Nearly everyone is a target: hotel workers, sheiks, children, teenagers on their way to school. Their experiences are eerily similar.
The abductions are well-organized, the kidnappers never show their faces, and they know about the victims' backgrounds and are willing to beat their victims.
They move the victims, blindfolded, and in many cases, they play "good cop, bad cop," to extract financial information.
In William's case, the kidnappers knew he had an aunt in the United States. "They said: 'You have relatives outside, in America. Tell them,'" and he did. William telephoned his aunt, and she sent $10,000 - not enough to get his son back.
He started bargaining for his baby's life, telling the kidnappers he could not come up with more than $20,000 after his boss agreed to front him another $10,000.
"They took it and brought my kid to some park near Baghdad and told me not to tell anyone. Only my boss and my friends know about the kidnapping; I was afraid to tell anyone."
William thinks he was targeted because he is a Christian. Iraqi Christians are feeling increasingly isolated as Islamist militants assume a higher profile in the country. "They told me: 'We will kill all of you Christians in Iraq, because we hate you.'" They said that when I received my kid," William said.
He said he is afraid to leave his house, wife and small children to go to work, but he is equally afraid of losing his job. His children - the ransomed baby and older twins - now never leave the house, and his mother has moved in with his wife. William locks all the windows and doors but still gets up at 3 a.m. to check the house and garage before going back to sleep.

Christians flee

Iraqi Christians, afraid that the violence unfolding in the country will be turned on them, are starting to flee across the borders into Jordan and Syria. Some apply for refugee status; others are just seeking safety until things improve back home. "Every day, they are going. They are leaving, selling their homes and driving across the border. The Christians staying here are the ones with no money or relatives to help," said a friend of William - also a hotel worker, a Christian woman with a small cross dangling from a necklace.
"I am preparing my papers for emigration, too," she said.
She gave her name only as Susan D. "All the Muslims hate the Christians in Iraq," said William, who said he would try to reach Syria. But Muslims also are targeted by kidnappers, whose main interest appears to be money.

Tough bargain

Sadoon Riyadh, who did not use his real name, is a Muslim sheik who lives in a well-off Baghdad neighborhood, in a comfortable house surrounded by a high wall and fence. His wife and daughters stayed out of the living room while he described his kidnapping, stopping briefly when his littlest girl brought bowls of ice cream.
"I was on my way back from a lunch with my son and accountant when a BMW car blocked the way and four people jumped out and pointed their guns at me - pistols and one heavy gun. "I thought they wanted my car, but they said: 'You are the one that is wanted.'"
Mr. Riyadh, 48, got into the BMW and sat in the middle of the kidnappers. "One of them put a pistol on my leg, another on my heart and another on my stomach. They drove toward Baghdad and told me if I moved, they would kill me at once," he recalled. He then was blindfolded and taken to the first stop, where they picked up a fifth person before continuing to a house that they entered through the garage.
"Then, they injected me with some kind of drug, and after 30 minutes, I fell completely asleep. I vaguely remember them moving me to another place and a new group of four to five people."
Mr. Riyadh was moved one more time, blindfolded, to a middle-class house with a family living in it, before the kidnappers started questioning him. "I didn't give them any details, but they knew everything about me," he said. At intervals, they would leave him in a room with his hands chained together or his legs chained to the bed, with three guards standing over him. They fed him chicken and beans twice a day and let him visit the toilet twice a day. On the fourth day, they started negotiating the price of his life, starting at $250,000.

The bargaining did not go well. Mr. Riyadh said he did not have the money, but the kidnappers insisted that he was a wealthy man - and they had the upper hand. They moved their hostage again, this time to a dark, abandoned officelike building, and put him in an dirty, rat-infested room about 6 by 6 feet wide. "At night, they would take me to the ground floor to a small room. They used guns with silencers and shot near my head and arms to scare me. I told them I didn't have that money, so they started torturing me every night at midnight.
"One would kick me and another would say, 'No, don't kick.' They whipped me with cables and water pipes on the legs and feet and face. For eight days."

Mr. Riyadh kept telling his captors he didn't have the money, so they began bargaining directly with his family. A final price of $30,000 was negotiated, and the family was told to deliver the money in three unmarked bags to three different places. Any contact with the police, they were told, and the whole family would die.
On the 12th day of his capture, at 11 p.m., the kidnappers got their money. At 5:15 the next morning, they blindfolded Mr. Riyadh, put him in the car and dropped him off near a garbage dump close to Sadr City, shooting at him as he fled down the street.
"A lot of people heard me shouting, and a lot of women ran to help me. I was begging for help. They gave me water and took me to the main street and hired a car to take me back to my area," he said. He walked the last blocks home to his family. "All of them were crying, all of my tribe was staying here, my uncles, brothers, they all stayed and waited those 12 days for me." But Mr. Riyadh's nightmare was not over. He lived in constant fear that the kidnappers would return and take his wife or his children. He kept them all locked in the house.
Finally, the whole family moved to Fallujah, a no man's land of insurgent groups but a haven of safety for Mr. Riyadh. Fallujah has fallen under strict Islamic rule, but with that has come an element of security that Mr. Riyadh says no longer exists in Baghdad.
Safety will return to Iraq only under the hand of a strong president who is able to fully apply the law, he said, because the country is not ready for democracy. "Only my youngest daughter will witness democracy," he added sadly.

Children Nightmares

Many Iraqis cannot wait that long. Fearing for the lives of his children and grandchildren, George Bobo helped them all leave Baghdad after his teenage grandsons and their driver were kidnapped in broad daylight outside the entrance to their school and held for ransom for five days.
Noor Bassam Nadeem, 16, and his brother Salam, 13, were safe in neighboring Jordan before they revealed what happened to them. Even then, talking about it clearly made them nervous.
The boys were being driven to school before 8 a.m. on April 17 for their final exams in the wealthy neighborhood of Mansoor when two cars blocked theirs. Inside the Toyota in front of their car were three gunmen.
"I was sitting in the front seat when one opened the door and pushed a gun into my side. The other two went to the back seat and sat on either side of Salam, pointing guns at his head and at the head of the driver," Noor recalled.
The driver was ordered to drive southwest from Baghdad and not stop at any of the police or military checkpoints that dot the city. They told the boys to keep their heads between their knees. Once they reached Saidiya district, on a major road not far from Baghdad International Airport, they were blindfolded and shoved into a different car.
"We were very scared. We thought we were going to be killed," Noor said. "One of them punched me in the face after they threatened to kill my brother and I said, 'No.'"
Then the abductors whacked the driver in the back of the head with a pistol, telling him to drive more carefully or he would be dead. Later, when the three gunmen arrived at a house, they drugged the driver and kept the boys blindfolded except to eat.
"They wore dishdashas [a straight, unbelted robe with long sleeves covering the body from neck to foot; also worn by Christian clergymen, who call it a cassock] and their head scarves, the red and black ones, covered their faces," said Salam, sitting on a chair next to his older brother. "They said they were resistance fighters fighting the Americans. They said, 'When we take money from you, we will give it to the resistance.'"
Although the kidnappers did not beat the boys, they fingered their pistols and threatened them while asking questions about their father's business. The captors did beat the driver, whom the boys could hear crying, hitting him so hard with cables on the back and legs that he was soon urinating blood.
"We were scared. We answered everything. In the beginning, we lied a little bit," Noor said. He described how the brothers were questioned separately and were tripped up when they tried to lie; how one of the kidnappers was nicer than the others, telling the boys he was in the gang against his will, and they,
in turn, spoke more freely. The teenagers slept together on the floor, too scared to talk, but trying to comfort each other. At one point, they were put on the phone to their parents. "I was crying. I talked to my mother, but only managed to say 'How are you?' before the connection was cut off," said Salam, adding that the kidnappers had threatened to kill his parents if the money did not arrive. The ransom for the boys was set at $1 million. Then the bargaining
started. By the third day, the kidnappers had come down to $300,000, and the boys' father was offering $15,000. The negotiations via cell phone continued for two days more until the kidnappers demanded $120,000 and said it was the final number.
"We knew that was the limit," said Mr. Bobo, who was in the house at the time. "Their mother was in a panic. She went crazy, shouting that if they didn't free her sons, she would kill herself. And the dad was in a bad state."
The father sold his business, borrowed money from friends, sold his car, got money from his father and finally scraped together $120,000. The ransom was delivered by a friend of the family on April 21, as instructed, in a black plastic bag at the specified location. At about 1 p.m., the family got the phone call for which they had been waiting: The boys would be set free within an hour. But they were not.
At 3 p.m., another call said the boys would be let go. Again, they were not. "It was a terrible game," Mr. Bobo said.
Noor and Salam finally arrived home at 9:15 that night. They and their driver had been dropped off on the side of the highway leading to Abu Ghraib prison and managed to flag down a taxi.
For days afterward, the kidnappers called the family to apologize and said that once they had evicted the Americans from Iraq, they would return the money.
On April 25, Mr. Bobo and his grandchildren took a taxi to the border with Jordan and into Amman, its capital. Noor and Salam's parents left Iraq to join them before the end of June.
Hundreds more, terrified by kidnappings and threats of violence, are following in their steps, driving to Jordan and neighboring Syria - the only two countries for which Iraqis have travel documents.