US Troops Free 42 Iraqis Held by al Qaeda
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Steven Taylor | Sunday, May 27, 2007 |
Cross-posted from
PoliBlog:
Via the AP: U.S. frees 42 Iraqi captives in raid
American forces freed 42 kidnapped Iraqis — some of whom had been hung from ceilings and tortured for months — in a raid Sunday on an al-Qaida hideout north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.[...]
Some of the men suffered broken bones. Some had been captive for as long as four months. One said he was just 14 years old, Caldwell said.
The 42 freed Iraqis marked the largest number of captives ever found in a single al-Qaida prison, he said.
According to the report, the captives were from the Diyala province–a Sunni dominated area where it has been reported that local militants had turned against al Qaeda operatives. The US military spokesman indicated that these captives are evidences of that conflict, although specific information to confirm that claim was not included in the report.
Aside from the bits of infor quoted above, there was no indication of who the captives were or why they might have been kidnapped.
About the Author: Steven is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Troy University in Alabama. He is the author of the book Voting Amid Violence: Electoral Democracy in Colombia, forthcoming from University of New England Press and the contributing editor on Colombia to the Library of Congress’s Handbook of Latin American Studies. He has his PhD from the University of Texas in Austin and a BA from the University of California at Irvine.
He does most of his blogging at PoliBlog, which he started in February 2003.
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