Iraq's rising industry: domestic kidnapping

Abu Mohammed was chatting with a friend in an auto repair shop in Salman Pak two months ago when masked gunmen surrounded him and stuffed his 260-pound frame in their trunk and sped away.

He spent the next 10 days locked in a bathroom with a hood over his head, marking the passage of time by listening to his captors' prayers.

A wealthy businessman who traveled daily from Baghdad to Salman Pak for more than 20 years, Mr. Mohammed survived after paying $60,000 to the kidnappers that he says were extremist Sunnis. "When I asked for a cigarette they said 'why do you want a cigarette?' It's haram," he says, using the Arabic word for something forbidden by Islam.

Mohammed and local residents say a raft of insurgents have flooded the Salman Pak area, located about 18 miles south of Baghdad and inside the Sunni stronghold known as the "Triangle of Death," since January, just over a month after the US Marine siege on Fallujah sent insurgents scattering to find new havens. In Salman Pak the result is a spate of violence and kidnappings that are stoking ethnic tensions.

"I knew my crime on the third day when I was taken to a court and sentenced. It was because I was a Shiite," said Mohammed, who declined to use his real name for fear of his safety.

The violence over the past few months in Salman Pak set the stage for an uproar this week over allegations that as many as 100 Shiites were kidnapped by Sunnis in Madain, a village in the same area. Reports surfaced that the kidnappers threatened to kill the hostages unless all Shiites left the area. That prompted the interim government to send troops to seal the area and search for hostages and insurgents. They didn't find any.

But on Wednesday, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said that 50 bodies were discovered in the Tigris river. It remains unclear if those bodies were found all at once or were even from the Salman Pak area, indicating that there had indeed been a mass attack on Shiites. If they were found over a longer period of time, that would be more evidence of the slow but steady nature of violence there in recent months.

The news drew scores of Iraqis whose relatives had disappeared in the area to a Madain area police station Thursday to examine photographs of bodies recovered from the Tigris.

While the occasional kidnapping of a foreigner here makes international headlines, Iraqis are kidnapped regularly to little notice. Criminal gangs have turned it into a cottage industry. But in a more troublesome development, ideologically driven insurgents are using it to cleave ethnic groups in areas such as Salman Pak - already an uneasy mix of Sunnis and Shiites.

"This area has for some time been a troubled area," says Sabah Kadhim, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior. "In the past there have been killings and revenge killings ... what happened was this situation was exploited by terrorists [who know] this is a good area to stir things up."

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