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Iraqi kidnappers sometimes care only about cash

It happened quickly.

Armed men, firing into the air dragged Jordanian car dealer Mahmoud Khazaaleh from his car, blindfolded him and spirited him away.

It was not the start of one those ordeals that have grabbed headlines, in which Iraqi insurgents threaten to kill hostages to influence government policy in faraway capitals.

Khazaaleh's captors had a much simpler goal.

They took his watch, a gold ring and US$8,000 dollars he'd earned from selling a car earlier that day.

He was freed more than a month later after he came up with US$4,000 more.

Amid the chaos of postwar Iraq, such kidnappings for pure financial gain have become common, with wealthy Iraqis as well as foreigners finding themselves the victims of the crimes.

These gang members may have told outsiders that they wanted to drive foreigners out of Iraq -- but all they wanted was cash, Khazaaleh said in a telephone interview from his home in northern Jordan.

"They pretended they were observant Muslims seeking to liberate Iraq," Khazaaleh said.

"But they are only a bunch of bandits and looters who want to make use of the security vacuum to make as much money as they can," he said.

Jordanians, major trading partners with their neighbors in Iraq before and after former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's fall, have been hit particularly hard by the violence.

The Transportation Ministry said Thursday that the kingdom had set up an area at the Iraqi border where Jordanian drivers could hand over cargo bound for Iraq to Iraqi truckers.

Iraqi truckers are seen as less likely to become victims of the kidnappings.

On Tuesday, the chief executive of a Jordanian firm working for the US military in Iraq said he would pull out of the country to win the release of two employees.

On Monday, Jordanian businessman Marwan al-Roussan was shot dead in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, according to his sister, parliament member Nariman al-Roussan.

But what were the hostage-takers' true aims?

Khazaaleh said villagers told him that his captors had killed those too poor to meet their demands for cash.

He said the gang, called the Abu al-Abbas Group, was infamous in the region near the Iranian border where he was grabbed on May 6.

He described a well-organized criminal enterprise headed by a man called al-Qaisar, Arabic for Caesar.

Khazaaleh said that after he was kidnapped, al-Qaisar's men would gather every night outside his window to drink and count the money they had acquired from other hostages.

He heard them talk about Kuwaiti, Indian and Pakistani victims, and about women whom they had employed to pretend to be prostitutes and to scout for wealthy, "easy prey" at local hotels.

Al-Khazaaleh said the gang kept him under close watch in a rundown house, with little food and water, and forced to endure poor sanitary conditions.

"They beat me and spit in my face, cursed Jordan, my king, my people and my family and honor and threatened to kill me when I begged them to let me go," he said.

Khazaaleh eventually borrowed the additional US$4,000 from a local cleric, the father of a woman who brought him food during his captivity, to meet his kidnappers' demands.

Jordanian security officials said al-Khazaaleh had debriefed them on his kidnapping.

They declined to provide details, saying it was difficult to independently verify his abduction.

Khazaaleh, 51, said he won't work in Iraq again.

"It's impossible to do business amid the chaos and lack of security and trust," he said.
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