Two weeks ahead of yet another democratic landmark in Iraq - voting for a full constitutional government - the kidnapping of Norman Kember, a British peace activist, and of Susanne Osthoff, a German social worker, has reopened an old wound.
Recently, Western public opinion had been under the illusion that the Iraqi kidnapping industry was becoming a feature of the past; 2005 was indeed characterized by a lull of several months in the parading and beheading of hostages.
While in 2004, 41 Westerners were killed by their captors, in 2005 only 11 hostages were executed. These statistics are misleading because "Westerner hostages represent a very small fraction of this trade", admits a former member of the Baath party.
They fail to give a realistic picture of the size and growth of the Iraqi kidnapping industry, which is today the biggest in the world. On a yearly basis over 5,000 people are kidnapped in Iraq, 2,000 more than in Colombia, until recently the world leader in this gruesome business.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein the Iraqi kidnapping industry has been consistently booming. As in Colombia, kidnapping in Iraq is a daily occurrence fueled not by terrorism but by the failure of the central political authority to control the territory. As in Colombia, kidnapping is a domestic industry and Iraqi nationals are at the same time its victims and perpetrators.
Over 70 percent of hostages are Iraqis or people from neighboring countries. They are predominantly doctors, engineers and businessmen, people who financially are able to meet ransom demands. More recently, children of rich families have been targeted; they are snatched from school and held hostage until the families buy back their freedom. The unlucky ones are executed or sold.
Official data from the Iraqi government show that in 2004, one in 5,000 Iraqis has been kidnapped; this figure is likely to rise in 2005. Police forces are simply overwhelmed by the number of people who disappear; often they do not even start an investigation.
Common criminals - most of them freed from prison after the Coalition forces' victory - represent the bulk of the industry. According to the head of the Iraqi kidnapping unit, families of criminals and gangs of students are also involved in the business because it is extremely profitable.
For the head of the anti-crime unit in Baghdad, the main objective of the majority of kidnappings is financial; accusing the victim of connections with Western companies is merely a strategy to force relatives to pay the ransom. Ransoms range from just a few hundred dollars to half a million.
Kidnapping of women has different objectives. They are sold as sex slaves to neighboring countries. "Women are cheap merchandise, products exchanged daily," said Houzan Mahmoud, of the Organization of Women Freedom in Iraq (Owfi). According to Owfi, virgins are sold for $200, twice the price of non-virgins. Iraqi police estimates that the price of a woman traded as a prostitute in the domestic market is as low as $60. Many women end up working as prostitutes in Jordan, where over 60 percent of prostitutes are Iraqi nationals.
The Iraqi authorities are convinced that kidnapping does not fund jihadist insurgent groups. Terror groups use hostages primarily to inflame Western public opinion, not to raise money. Hostages are released only if the political demands attached to their freedom are met.
Thus a fundamental difference exists between criminal and terror motivations.
In Wisaya li-l-mujahedin, Recommendations for the Mujahideen, Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi explains this disparity. "We have decided not to free these infidels [hostages] even if they pay a ransom equivalent to their weight in gold. We do not compromise in front of God to free prisoners in exchange of money ... The enemies of God must be told that in our heart there is not mercy for them: either if they are set free or if they are beheaded."
Referring specifically to the kidnapping of Nicolas Berg he adds "some mediators attempted to convince us to let him free in exchange of a large sum of money. Even if we needed the cash, we decided not to take it and revenge our sisters and our community." One of the requests to save Berg's life was to free women prisoners in Iraq.
Jihadist groups are part of the kidnapping industry only when they get involved in the commercialization of hostages, i.e. when groups exchange prisoners among themselves for cash, arms and ammunition. Rory Carroll, the Baghdad correspondent of the Guardian kidnapped in October, was terrified to be sold to Zarqawi's group. This is not a new phenomenon. In Lebanon, during the civil war, Western hostages were bought and sold frequently.
Hussein Kemal, in charge of intelligence for the Iraqi ministry of interior, believes that there are commercial relationships between Iraqi criminal and terror groups. "Sometimes terrorists pay criminal gangs to kidnap hostages, other times criminal groups sell the hostages to terror organizations; this happens when they play a political role or when relatives are unable to pay the ransom."
Kidnapping by jihadist groups is a relatively new phenomenon. The practice was unknown during the anti-Soviet Jihad.
Political blackmail through hostage taking springs from the introduction of terror techniques in the jihadists' armed struggle. One of the first examples took place in Chechnya under Khattab, who Zarqawi has always admired and considered a role model. The most dramatic case happened in the summer of 2004 in Beslan, when an entire school was held hostage.
Radical religious scholars have legitimized the kidnapping of Western hostages with several fatwas that include references to the beheading of hostages. Zarqawi even makes a reference to the Prophet who, according to some interpretations, gave the order to kill prisoners after the battle of Badr.
All armed groups active in Insurgent Iraq have been involved in kidnapping. They use their own interpretation of these fatwas to legitimize the targeting of their victims. The Movement of Islamic Resistance, for example, took eight Chinese citizens hostage even though China was against the war in Iraq. They justified the kidnapping on the basis that China was helping the US Army. Eventually they released them.
Ansar Al Sunna, an organization born in September 2003 from the groups that had merged into Ansar Al Islam, took 12 Nepalese hostages and killed them, showing the execution on the Internet.
Last March 19, the Patriotic Movement for the Liberation of Mesopotamia, a new group, claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of two Egyptian engineers in Baghdad. The group stated that the hostages "were working and cooperating with the illegitimate government of Iraq, which does not represent the Iraqi people but the occupying American troops". The statement ended with a chilling warning to the world, "'We will no show mercy to anybody who enters Iraq, Arab or non-Arab, and works for the occupying power or for the new government."
Most likely, the destiny of Kember, British peace activist and Osthoff, the German social worker, hangs on the interpretation of this terrifying sentence.
Loretta Napoleoni is an international terrorism expert and author of Insurgent Iraq: Al Zarqawi and the new generation and "Terror Inc: Tracing the dollars behind the terror network. As chairwoman of the countering terrorism financing group for the Club de Madrid, Loretta Napoleoni brought heads of state together to create a strategy for combating the financing of terror networks. Acknowledgement to United Press International
Viewpoint: Kidnap business boom in Iraq
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