Gunmen in Iraqi army uniforms kidnapped two dozen employees at Red Crescent offices in downtown Baghdad on Sunday, high-lighting the threat to humanitarian workers that have been swept up in Iraq's lawlessness.
The mass abduction on Sunday was the latest in a series of such attacks that have targeted workers at factories, delegates at a sports conference and bystanders at bus stations. In most cases, the gunmen wore police or military uniforms. Their identity and motives were unclear, though the sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites has fueled much of the recent violence in Baghdad.
Gunmen in five pickup trucks pulled up to the office of the Iraqi Red Crescent at around 11am, police said.
A Red Crescent official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of safety concerns, said the gunmen left women behind and that six workers were later released.
The Dutch Foreign Ministry said three Iraqi security guards at its embassy building in Baghdad were kidnapped along with the Red Crescent employees, and that one was later released.
The embassy is next to the offices of the Iraqi aid group.
The Red Crescent, part of the International Red Cross movement, has around 1,000 staff and some 200,000 volunteers in Iraq.
It works closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross, which visits detainees and tries to provide food, water and medicine to Iraqis.
Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the committee's director of operations, said it was the only aid organization able to work throughout Iraq.
After the committee's Baghdad headquarters was bombed in 2003, workers began traveling incognito for fear that they would be targeted by armed groups.
"We urge all those who have, or may have, or may use their moral or political influence on the ground, to call for respect of human rights and dignity," Kraehenbuehl said.
Antonella Notari, another Red Cross official in Geneva, said the organization was in contact with the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which denied any involvement and was searching for the abductees.
Some Iraqi police and military units have been infiltrated by Shiite militias linked to ruling political parties.
Mazin Abdellaha, secretary-general of the Iraqi Red Crescent, said the agency "helps all people regardless of their sect or ethnicity."
Kraehenbuehl dismissed sug-gestions that the abduction was linked to recent comments by the Iraqi Red Crescent's vice president, Jamal al-Karbouli, that American forces represented a greater danger to its work than militants in the Sunni-dominated insurgency.
"The insurgents, they are Iraqis, a lot of them are Iraqis, and they respect the Iraqis. And they respect our [the Red Crescent's] identity, which is neutrality," al-Karbouli said on Friday.
Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, a US military spokesman in Baghdad, said in response that the US-led coalition forces "strive to ensure they are respectful when they conduct interaction with the local population."
Many international aid organizations closed down their operations in Iraq as the security situation deteriorated after the US-led invasion that deposed former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Margaret Hassan, the director of CARE International in Iraq and a citizen of Britain, Ireland and Iraq, was abducted in Baghdad in October 2004.
She was killed a month later and her body has never been found.
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