Americans missing in Baghdad kidnapped by Iran-backed militia: four sources

Witnesses said men in uniform carried out the kidnapping in broad daylight Saturday, 100 yards (meters) from a police station.

An Interior Ministry source told Xinhua that information about the incident so far is very rare and restricted, but he said that the security forces have deployed in several areas in Baghdad and set up checkpoints on main streets as part of the search operation.

Unknown gunmen seized the Americans on Friday from a private residence in the capital’s southeastern Dora district, according to Iraqi officials.

The apartment may have been the home of an Iraqi colleague who is also believed to have been abducted, the officials and reports said.

Iraqi authorities continued searching Tuesday for three American contractors amid reports the men might have been kidnapped in Baghdad over the weekend. Two of the three also had Iraqi citizenship, he said.

USA sources told Reuters that Washington had no reason to believe Tehran was involved in the kidnapping and does not believe the three are being held in Iran.

Responding to a call to arms from Shiite clerics in Iraq after the Islamic State group swept across the country’s northern and western provinces in the summer of 2014, Shiite militias in Iraq now wield more power than the country’s regular security forces and military.

Last month, gunmen kidnapped more than two dozen Qataris who had come to southern Iraq to hunt.

Last month, Iraqi troops pushed IS fighters out of the center of Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar province in Iraq’s Sunni heartland.

“You kidnap 26 Qataris out in the desert, that’s not like four or five yahoos out in the south….” Besides Shiite militias, the perpetrators of kidnappings in Iraq have included the Islamic State group, as well as criminal gangs demanding ransom payments or disgruntled employees seeking to resolve workplace disputes. “It must be some relatively established group that did it”, he said.

A spokesman for the US Embassy spoke to the media on Sunday and reported that they were working “in full cooperation” with officials from Iraq to help locate the Americans that were missing.

The Iraqi government has struggled to rein in local Shiite militias, who fought the USA military following the 2003 invasion, and have previously been accused of abducting and killing United States nationals.

Although the militias are fighting on the same side as the U.S.-led coalition against IS, many remain staunchly anti-American.

Brothels and alcohol shops have been repeatedly targeted by powerful Shiite militia groups in Baghdad over the years.