Iraqi gunmen abduct 50 security workers

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Uniformed gunmen swarmed a private security company and took away all 50 employees Wednesday, a mysterious raid that highlighted the lawlessness of the Iraqi capital.

At least 10 armored pickup trucks pulled up to the Al Rawafid security company in the afternoon. The cars bore no license plates, which is unusual in Iraq. Bands of men stormed into the building and seized everyone inside, along with an undisclosed amount of cash from the company’s safe, police sources said. Witnesses said the employees were packed into the waiting cars and driven away. Their fate was unknown.

In a city where the lines between militias and Iraqi security forces have become increasingly blurred, it was not clear whether the operation was a mass kidnapping or an extrajudicial seizure by renegade police.

The security company, located on the main road of the religiously mixed Baghdad neighborhood of Zayouna, is among numerous security firms that cropped up in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion nearly three years ago. Many of the guards employed by Al Rawafid are former soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s armed forces, according to news reports.

The incident at the security company unfolded against a backdrop of brazen violence.

Hours earlier, the bodies of 18 men were found stuffed into an abandoned truck near a bus depot in a predominantly Sunni area of western Baghdad. There were young men and old men, handcuffed and marked with bruises and burns. Some appeared to have been hanged; a few were shot. The Baghdad morgue identified some of the men as members of a Sunni tribe from western Iraq.

As the day wore on, six more bodies turned up around the capital, authorities said.

The discovery of corpses has become a morbid, but everyday, facet of life in Iraq. Many of those kidnapped and killed are victims of a bloody power struggle between Shiites and Sunnis, the two major Muslim sects.

Sunnis complain that renegade units of the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry have been stalking their neighborhoods and allowing militias to infiltrate police forces in preparation for a possible of civil war.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a Shiite political appointee with ties to the Badr Brigade militia, has been accused by many Sunnis for allowing death squads to form and operate under the cover of official security forces.

Jabr escaped an apparent assassination attempt Wednesday when the vehicles in his convoy were struck by a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad, a source at the ministry said. The minister was not in the car at the time; his drivers had ventured out to fill up with gasoline. Two of his employees were killed, and five wounded.