Spurred by a tip from a detainee, a multinational military force stormed a house in western Baghdad early today and rescued two Canadians and a Briton who had been held hostage by a shadowy guerrilla group for nearly four months.
James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, both from Canada; and Norman Kember, 74, from Britain, were discovered bound and sequestered in a house in a residential district of the capital, officials reported. The three were whisked to the fortified Green Zone and debriefed by the authorities but did not address the media, officials said.
The men, all activists working for Christian Peacemaker Teams, had been captured Nov. 26 along with an American colleague, Tom Fox, 54, of Clear Brook, Va., whose body was discovered March 9 wrapped in plastic and dumped on a trash pile in western Baghdad. Mr. Fox had been tortured, handcuffed and shot, the police said.
Today's rescue, by a force that included American and British troops, was one of the few times that military action in Iraq has played a decisive role in a hostage release.
But within an hour of the event, a surge of four car bombings, including a suicide attack, struck Baghdad, killing at least 23 people, wounding at least 48 and tempering the military's euphoria from the morning's exceptional success.
The attacks followed five days in which there had been no incidents in the capital involving car bombs, suicide car bombs or suicide attackers wearing vests packed with explosives, according to an American military spokesman, who insisted that the relative lull was a result of expanded security operations in Baghdad.
But the convergence of the devastating attacks, coming within about four hours of one another, suggested that the guerrillas' ability to operate in the capital remained unfettered.
"As you're well aware, today he surged," acknowledged Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a senior military spokesman, using his preferred pronoun to describe the amorphous insurgency. "He still has that capability."
Military commanders jealously guarded details of the morning's rescue operation, saying they did not want to compromise ongoing operations. Among the scant information General Lynch offered in a press briefing, he said a detainee captured Wednesday night had provided the authorities with information that guided them to the house where the three hostages were being held. The captives were found unguarded, their kidnappers having vanished, General Lynch said.
Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, said Mr. Kember was in "reasonable" condition and the two Canadians had to be hospitalized.
More than 200 foreigners, including many citizens of Arab nations, have been abducted since the American invasion in spring 2003, some by criminal gangs seeking a ransom and others by insurgents trying to compel foreign governments to cut ties to Iraq. About 50 of those captives have been confirmed as killed, some in ghoulish videotaped beheadings, and about 20 are still missing, including the American reporter Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped on Jan. 7.
Abductions of Westerners peaked in late 2004, forcing many foreigners here to adopt stricter security measures, including sharply curtailed travel and the fortifying of homes and offices. Others simply left the country.
Militant Shiite opponents of the American-led foreign presence in Iraq are widely believed to have committed at least two high-profile kidnappings of Westerners, both journalists, but most abductions, including those of the Christian peace workers, have been by Sunni-led rebel groups seeking to drive foreigners out of the country.
Among other cases in which the military helped to secure a hostage release, American forces, responding to a tip from an Iraqi detainee, rescued two hostages, an American and an Iraqi, from an isolated farmhouse south of Baghdad last September. The American, Roy Hallums, had been working as a contractor for a Saudi Arabian company when he was kidnapped in 2004.
Last June, Iraqi troops raided a house in Baghdad and freed an Australian hostage, Douglas Wood, from nearly seven weeks of captivity. But according to some officials, the troops had been conducting a routine search operation and had stumbled across Mr. Wood by accident. Other captives have been discovered in vehicles in routine checks at roadblocks, officials said.
Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, said in a statement that the rescue operation today was a multinational effort involving British troops and followed "weeks and weeks of very careful work by military and coalition personnel in Iraq, and many civilians as well."
The Rev. Alan Betteridge, president of the Baptist Peace Fellowship and a friend of Mr. Kember's for more than 40 years, told the BBC that "it's tremendously good and so unexpected after the killing of Tom Fox a couple of weeks ago, when we really did fear that each one would be killed eventually."
Christian Peacemaker Teams, which is based in Chicago and Toronto and grew out of a collection of churches including the Mennonites and the Quakers, sends groups of Christians to conflict zones around the world to promote peace and human rights. The four activists had been captured while driving to meet with Sunni Arab leaders in western Baghdad.
The captors had periodically released videotapes of the men and renewed their threats to kill them. In early March, a videotape emerged showing three of the men, but not Mr. Fox.
The eruption of car bombings today began about 9 a.m. when a car packed with explosives was detonated in Karada, an upscale neighborhood, as a police patrol passed by, an official with the Interior Ministry said. One civilian was wounded.
An hour later, someone triggered a charge planted in a vehicle parked in the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Adhamiya, the official said. The explosion, which apparently targeted a passing police patrol, killed three police officers and wounded five others.
About an hour later, a suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives at the entrance to the headquarters of the Interior Ministry's major crimes unit in central Baghdad, killing 10 police officers and 5 civilians and wounding 32 others, including police officers and civilians, the ministry official reported.
Five other people were killed and 10 were wounded, according to the authorities, when a second car bomb exploded at about 1:15 p.m. near an outdoor market and a Shiite mosque in western Baghdad.
This story is so crazy. These "activists" didn't even want soldiers to save them. Instead, they had to be rescued through grassroots political means. Peh! I've had enough of this guys.
Hat tip: The New York Times
