Iraq frees 400 detainees, raising hope for hostage

By Jay Deshmukh
AFP
BAGHDAD
Petroleumworld.com 01 27 06

More than 400 Iraqi detainees, including five women, were freed on Thursday in a move that could help secure the release of a kidnapped US woman reporter.
The mass release came as the top US army chief in Iraq acknowledged that his forces were strained in the war-torn country, where a government has yet to be formed almost six weeks after the landmark election.

The release of the detainees -- all held without trial -- has raised hopes for the fate of Jill Carroll, a US reporter seized in Baghdad on January 7 by insurgents who had threatened to kill her unless US forces released Iraqi women in their custody.

"We have released 419 detainees today including five women," a spokesman for the US detention facilities in Iraq told AFP. Another four women are still held in US-administered prisons.

One of the trucks carrying freed prisoners hit a roadside bomb in the upmarket Baghdad neighborhood of Mansur, but it was only lightly damaged and there were no casualties.

Carroll, 28, is one of the nearly 250 foreigners seized in Iraq since the March 2003 US-led invasion, and one of the victims of a recent spate in hostage-takings.

While Iraqi and US officials have denied that the releases have anything to do with Carroll's case, there is hope the move might help her regardless.

"Let me assert that there is no connection between the release and kidnapping of the US reporter. The release was finalised after a review by the Iraqi-US board," the US spokesman said.

"When they were detained we had enough evidence to indicate that they were an imminent threat to the security of Iraq and were detained as per the UN Security Council regulations. But there was no trial for a specific crime."

Meanwhile, the commander of multinational forces in Iraq, General George Casey, acknowledged that US military strength around the world is stretched.

"The forces are stretched. I don't think there is any question about that," he said in response to questions about two reports to that effect.

He was speaking in the city of Diwaniyah as responsibility for the security of a vast swathe of the south was turned over to Iraq's 8th army division.

"Folks are stretched and they are doing an excellent job and they are certainly accomplishing their mission," he added.

Analysts warned in the two reports released in the United States that the US military had become perilously overstretched by its deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One report was by an outside expert hired by the Pentagon. The other was by people who worked under former president Bill Clinton.

"This strain, if not soon relieved, will have highly corrosive and potentially long-term effects on the force," the report by the Clinton people said.

US and Iraqi forces are searching for two German engineers, Rene Braunlich and Thomas Nilzchke, seized at gunpoint on Tuesday by men posing as Iraqi soldiers outside an oil refinery in the northern town of Baiji.

A delegation of Kenyan Muslims is planning to visit Iraq to plead for the release of two Kenyan telecommunications engineers abducted last week in Baghdad.

The fate of four Western peace activists seized in November was also uncertain, as was the status of a Jordanian hostage after a videotape from his captors set a new deadline to kill him.

The spate of hostage-taking, which could be politically or just financially motivated, comes as political parties jockey ahead of talks to form a broadly based government to rule the country for the next four years.

Washington hopes the government that emerges from the December 15 election will include representatives of the Sunni Arab minority, which it is hoped would undermine the insurgency.

However, top Sunnis insist that moves towards greater federalism should be put on a back-burner as a price of their joining the new government.

The Sunnis, dominant under ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, fear that an Iraq comprised of autonomous regions might rob them of the country's vast oil wealth, which is concentrated in the mainly Shiite south and the Kurdish north.

Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi said that the dominant conservative Shiite coalition would soon put forth its candidate for prime minister, some six weeks after the elections.

In rebel violence Sunni Industry Minister Osama al-Najafi survived a roadside bomb attack but his three bodgyards were killed.

Two US soldiers were killed and another wounded Wednesday in separate attacks, the US military said, taking the toll of US casualties in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to 2,241, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.

On Thursday, the head of an association of former prisoners was shot dead along with one of his relatives, while a police patrol in Baghdad came under attack, with one policeman killed.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, rebels killed five people in separate attacks.
And police found 10 bodies riddled with bullets near a water purification plant on the eastern outskirts of Baghdad, an interior ministry official said. jds/al

AFP 01/26/06

Copyright © 2006 AFP. All rights reserved

 

 

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