- Iraqi authorities yesterday admitted they still had no
clear idea about who killed the aid worker Margaret Hassan. Investigators
are being hindered by the uniqueness of the case, and the complexity of
the insurgency.
-
- In previous kidnappings, Iraq's several insurgent groups
have been quick to identify themselves and claim responsibility, using
videos to make their demands. From the moment Mrs Hassan was seized her
case was different.
-
- Mrs Hassan, who had Iraqi nationality and spoke fluent
Arabic, was taken from her car as she drove to work at the Care offices
in Baghdad on October 19. Two videos emerged, showing her in an increasingly
desperate state pleading for her life and asking for the withdrawal of
British troops from Iraq.
-
- At one point her kidnappers described themselves as an
"armed Islamic group".
-
- But unlike previous incidents they gave themselves no
specific name and used no banners or flags to identify themselves.
-
- Again in the final video showing her apparent death,
shot in the head by a masked gunman, there was no insignia to identify
a particular group.
-
- Efforts were made to begin negotiations with her kidnappers
but to no avail. Information campaigns were started and a poster showing
Mrs Hassan holding a sick Iraqi child was put up on billboards across the
capital. "Margaret Hassan is truly a daughter of Iraq. She is against
the occupation," they read.
-
- Her kidnappers were unmoved. At one point they threatened
to hand her over to Tawhid and Jihad, the extreme militant group based
in Falluja that is led by a young Iraqi named Omar Hadid and Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the wanted Jordanian militant.
-
- But Tawhid and Jihad, which has produced several videos
of gruesome murders including that of Ken Bigley, the British contractor,
promised to release Mrs Hassan if she was handed over to them.
-
- Her case appears to confirm accounts from figures in
the insurgency that the movement is made up of several independent groups
with little overall leadership and with frequently different methods and
agendas.
-
- It is most likely she was captured by a radical Sunni
Islamic group, since they form the core of the violent guerrilla movement
that has fought the US occupation.
-
- Among them are several better known groups, including
Tawhid and Jihad, which now calls itself al-Qaida in Iraq, as well as the
Islamic Army, Ansar al-Sunna, the First Army of Mohammad and the 1920 Revolution
Brigades.
-
- But there appear to be other smaller offshoots. For some
their agenda appears to be simply to force the US military and all other
Westerners from Iraq and to destabilise the Baghdad government into collapse.
Most were based in Falluja, at least until the US military operation last
week, but have bases elsewhere including Baghdad and the town of Latifiya,
south of the capital. The mutilated body of a woman, apparently a westerner,
was found on a street in Falluja last week, though British officials said
yesterday they have yet to determine whether it was Mrs Hassan.
-
- Canon Andrew White, of Coventry Cathedral and the international
director of the Iraqi Institute of Peace, was involved in negotiations
to obtain Mrs Hassan's release. He said that "rogue terrorist groups"
had begun to emerge and that her kidnappers were "very likely criminal".
-
- "One of the worrying things about the development
of the whole kidnapping scenario is that we are no longer dealing with
the established groups where at least we understood something of their
methodology. Now kidnapping is the kind of thing taken up by any kind of
rogue terrorist group," he told the Guardian last night from Dubai.
"They don't play by the rules of kidnapping."
-
- He said the situation in Iraq appeared increasingly out
of control. "It is very difficult to have any sense of where things
are going. I don't think there will be any magical cure to the tragedy
at the moment."
-
- He said elections should still be held. "It is really
important to push ahead with the plans, otherwise the insurgents will say
they have won. They are trying to prevent any sort of order being re-established."
-
- The leadership of the insurgent groups are predominantly
Iraqi, though there are other Arab fighters involved at lower levels. Some
of their agendas are regarded as too extreme even by mainstream insurgent
figures.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1353695,00.html
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