MIDDLE EAST

Shiite Militia Releases Video of Turkish Workers Kidnapped in Iraq

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BAGHDAD — A previously unknown Shiite militia released a video Friday that shows more than a dozen Turkish construction workers who were kidnapped in Baghdad recently and demands that Turkey stop the flow of jihadists into Iraq and lift a siege of several Shiite-dominated villages in Syria.
If its demands — issued in writing, in Arabic, at the end of the video — are not met, the group vowed that it would “strike the interests of Turkey and its agents in Iraq with the most violent means.”
Many Shiite militias operate in Iraq, many with the backing of Iran, but the group that purported to release the video Friday had not previously been heard of. It called itself “Death Squads” and referred to Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad revered by Shiites as a martyr whose death in 680 at the hands of Sunnis was the beginning of the sectarian divide within Islam.
The abduction of the workers — a Turkish official has said that 17 Turks and their Iraqi Kurdish translator were taken — occurred in the early morning hours of Sept. 2 at a construction site in Sadr City, a vast Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. The workers were building a large soccer stadium. Since then Iraqi security officials have been investigating, and a recent shootout in Baghdad between the security forces and militiamen was said to have stemmed from that investigation.
In the video released Friday, the Turkish men, one by one, state their names and call on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to fulfill the demands of their abductors. Standing behind the hostages are five masked men holding automatic weapons. The demands include stopping the flow of oil from Iraqi Kurdistan through Turkey, something that has been at the heart of a dispute between Baghdad and the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north.
One of the hostages says, “We are foreign workers who have come here to earn our bread.” He continues: “We are now victims as a result of some foreign policies, some meaningless, inconsistent business.”
The demands also include lifting a siege on four Shiite villages in northern Syria that the group says are under threat from a Syrian rebel group backed by Turkey.
As Syria and Iraq have devolved into civil war, hostage-taking — for political reasons or simply making money — has proliferated. Much of the attention has focused on abductions, and subsequent beheadings, by the Islamic State, which this week said it had a Norwegian and a Chinese citizen in custody. Last summer the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL, abducted dozens of Turkish militants in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which remains in the control of the extremist group.
Almost immediately, though, the kidnapping of the Turks was believed to be the work of a Shiite group, given that it happened in the heart of Baghdad, where the Islamic State would be unlikely to be able to carry out such an operation.
There was no immediate comment from Nurol Holding, the Turkish construction company that employed the men. A Turkish foreign ministry official told Reuters, “Our ministry, our embassy in Baghdad and related institutions have been closely following the developments about the workers since they were kidnapped.”
Ceylan Yeginsu contributed reporting from Istanbul