Turkish MPs head to Baghdad for kidnapped workers

BAGHDAD

DHA photo

Deputies from the Republican People’s Party (CHP) arrived in Baghdad on Sept. 5 to monitor rescue efforts for 18 abducted Turkish workers, official sources said, as daily Hürriyet reported that the workers were taken away in 16 vehicles by the kidnappers. 

On Sept. 3, men in military uniform reportedly abducted the 18, including 14 workers, three engineers and an accountant after raiding a construction site of a Turkish company, Nurol Holding, in Sadr city, a Baghdad suburb.

Deputies Mahmut Tanal, Ahmet Akın and Tahsin Tarhan were said to be in Baghdad to contribute to the ongoing rescue efforts for the Turkish citizens.

Turkey’s envoy to Baghdad, Faruk Kaymakçı, was keeping the deputies informed about the issue.

Iraqi Youth and Sports Minister Abdul-Hussein Abtan and Interior Minister Mohammed Salem al-Ghabban also spoke with the deputies about the kidnapping incident.

“We will do our best for our brothers,” Akın told media at Atatürk International Airport in Istanbul before leaving for Baghdad earlier on Sept. 5.

“Our aim is to bring good news. There is no information on who abducted them. I hope it will be clear after we go and work there,” Tarhan said at the airport.

Hürriyet’s Uğur Ergan reported that Shite militants who abducted the workers were changing position constantly with 16 SUVs. The Iraqi security forces were following the kidnappers over a 35 to 40 kilometer area, Ergan quoted Ankara sources as saying. 

The kidnapping of the 18 was neither the work of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant nor the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), according to Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioğlu. 

“What we know is that it is not [the work of] one of the terrorist organizations that we are all familiar with; it is not Daesh or PKK,” Sinirlioğlu told the media in parliament on Sept. 3.