Three Americans ‘abducted from Baghdad apartment’

US State Department spokesman John Kirby said Sunday that the US was “working with the full cooperation of the Iraqi authorities to locate and recover the individuals”.

The U.S. State Department said on Sunday it was working with Iraqi authorities to locate Americans reported missing, without confirming they had been kidnapped.

The three missing Americans were providing maintenance for the US training program for Iraqi Special Operations forces, the contractor said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to describe the incident publicly.

American embassy in Iraq’s capital Baghad. Iskandar Witwit, deputy head of the same panel, gave a similar account citing senior security officials who said the civilians had been taken from the district’s Sihha residential complex.

“Gunmen in military uniforms came in five or six SUVs, they entered the building and then left nearly immediately”, said Mohammad Jabar, 35, who runs a shop down the street from the three-story apartment building where the Americans had been invited by their Iraqi interpreter.

An Iraqi intelligence official told the Associated Press that the men were taken to Sadr City, a predominantly Shia district in north-eastern Baghdad, while a policeman in Dora said they were driven towards the airport, south-east of the capital.

Baghdad has seen a rise in gangs carrying out killings and kidnapping. “But it highlights in the most human way what happens when people think they can get something by taking American hostages”. One of the men is an engineer from Kansas, and another is a Miami-based maintenance specialist of Egyptian heritage. In that paper, for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Smyth wrote that armed groups loyal to Iran could soon change their focus from fighting jihadists such as the Islamic State to “possibly disrupting US or regional allies’ interests in the Middle East and globally”.

Following the IS takeover of Iraq’s second largest city Mosul and large swaths of territory in the country’s north and west, Iraq has witnessed a deterioration in security as government forces were sent to front lines and Shiite militias were empowered to aid in the fight following the collapse of the Iraqi military. But Shiite militia groups have a major presence in southern Iraq, while IS does not.