(MENAFN- Arab Times) Iraqi security forces investigating the abduction of 18 Turkish construction workers raided the Baghdad headquarters of a powerful Iranian-backed Shi'ite militia overnight, security sources and officials said on Friday.
Gunmen in military uniform had seized the Turks on Wednesday from a sports stadium they were building in northeastern Baghdad, in what Ankara said appeared to have been a targeted kidnapping. The militia, Kataib Hezbollah, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Baghdad has struggled to rein in Shi'ite armed groups, many of which fought the US occupation and are now seen as a critical deterrent against the militants of Islamic State, who have vowed to march on the capital after seizing large swathes of the north and west last summer.
The city has also seen a proliferation in recent years of well-armed criminal gangs carrying out contract killings, kidnappings and extortion. Diplomats have said Turkey could suffer reprisals after abandoning months of reticence to launch air strikes against Islamic State in neighbouring Syria and open its bases to a US-led coalition fighting the Sunni Muslim militants. Saad al-Hadithi, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, said security forces had come under fire on Thursday night when they tried to raid a house on Palestine Street in Baghdad's eastern district of Mohandessen.
Intelligence had indicated the presence there of a member of the group involved in the Turks' abduction, he said. Iraq's top Shi'ite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on Friday called for the prosecution of the most senior officials suspected of corruption and the retrieval of stolen funds. Sistani, whose word few Iraqi politicians would openly challenge, has put his authority behind a recent reform drive by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and urged him to take a stronger stance against the corruption and mismanagement that have made Iraq nearly impossible to govern.
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