Forces surround Iraqi town amid mass kidnap claims

Iraqi security forces, backed by US military, swept into a town south of Baghdad at dawn today after reports Sunni militants had kidnapped as many as 100 Shiites.

But residents and Sunni clerics said the reports had been grossly exaggerated by government officials bent on re-establishing control in the lawless region the US military has called the “Triangle of Death” because it has become a stronghold of the militant Sunni insurgency.

Hundreds of Iraqi police entered Madain, deploying on rooftops and moving through streets in vehicles and on foot. There was no resistance and no hostages were found in the agricultural town of about 1,000 families, evenly divided between Shiites and Sunnis.

National Security Minister Qassim Dawoud warned Parliament yesterday of attempts to draw the country into sectarian war. Addressing legislators today, he pledged to “chase down terror everywhere”.

He said Iraqi forces had discovered rooms full of mines, ammunition and car bomb making equipment in Madain. Six completed car bombs were recovered and were being diffused, he said.

A number of suspected insurgents were also detained.

A correspondent for Al-Arabiya television, embedded with Iraqi forces, reported six Iraqi police and special forces brigades were participating in the operation in Madain.

Fewer than 200 American troops were providing air cover, medical evacuation services and a quick reaction force which would only be sent in if needed, the US military said.

Nervous residents peeped through their windows, or gave quick waves from their doors, but streets were largely deserted.

Iraqi police and special forces searched farms and orchards on the outskirts of the town. At one farm, they found stolen cars, bomb making equipment and instructions on how to use weapons.

The confusion over what happened in Madain illustrated how quickly rumours spread in a country of deep ethnic and sectarian divides, where the threat of violence is all too real.

Poor communications, and the difficulty of travelling from one town to the next because of daily attacks on the roads, make it difficult even for government officials to establish the facts.

A Defence Ministry official, Haidar Khayon, said yesterday that Iraqi forces raided the town and freed about 15 Shiite families and captured five hostage takers in a skirmish with light gunfire.

He said there were no casualties in what officials had described as a tense stand-off in which Sunni militants were threatening to kill their Shiite captives if all other Shiites did not leave the town.

Iraq’s most influential Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged government officials to resolve the crisis peacefully, his office said yesterday.

By the end of the day, however, Iraqi officials had produced no hostages and Iraqi military officials and police who had given information about the troubles in Madain could not be reached for further details.

Sheikh Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, a spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars, an organisation of Sunni clerics, denied hostages had been taken in Madain. “This news is completely untrue,” he told al-Jazeera television yesterday.

The country’s most-feared insurgent group, al-Qaida in Iraq, also denied there had been any hostage-taking in a statement yesterday on an Islamic website known for its militant content.

The group, headed by the Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said the incident was a fabrication by the “enemies of God” to justify a military attack on Madain aimed at Sunnis.

An AP television cameraman toured the town yesterday morning and saw no sign of unrest. People were going about their business normally, shops were open and tea houses were full, he said. Residents contacted by telephone also said everything was normal in Madain.

Whatever happened there began on Thursday when Shiite leaders claimed Sunni militants had seriously damaged a town mosque in a bomb attack.

The next day, the Shiites said, masked militants drove through the town, capturing Shiite residents and threatening to kill them unless all Shiites left.

Shiite leaders and government officials initially estimated 35 to 100 people were taken hostage, but residents disputed the claim, with some saying they had seen no evidence any hostages were taken.

The distracting events surrounding Madain erupted as Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite leader, was trying to entice members of Iraq’s Sunni minority into a new Cabinet, as a government is formed after the January 30 national elections.

Sunnis make up about 20% of Iraq’s estimated 26 million population, but were dominant under Saddam Hussein. Since US-led forces drove him from power two years ago, the disempowered Sunnis are believed to form the backbone of the ongoing insurgency, fearing a loss of influence to majority Shiites.

At least 33 people died over the weekend in insurgent violence elsewhere in Iraq, including four US soldiers and a 28-year-old American aid worker identified as Marla Ruzicka, the founder of a group that was trying to determine the number of civilian casualties in Iraq.

Today, two Iraqi policemen were killed and six injured when a roadside bomb exploded as their two patrol vehicles drove through Basra in southern Iraq, said police Capt Alaa Hasan.

In northern Iraq, an explosion damaged an oil pipeline near Beiji, the country’s largest refinery, starting a huge fire and leaking oil toward the nearby Tigris River.