The Missing

Just how many foreigners are being held hostage in Iraq? The numbers are higher than most people realize—partly because victims’ relatives and employees don’t publicize disappearances for fear of jeopardizing negotiations for their release. NEWSWEEK’s calculations, however, show that at least 43 kidnapped foreigners , including 14 Americans, are still missing inside the country.

These are at best minimum figures, compiled by NEWSWEEK from both published accounts and data from U.S. officials in Baghdad, where the State Department has a high-level Hostage Working Group actively investigating the cases of the Americans, and assisting in the inquiries about other missing foreigners. While those kidnapped as far back as October 2003 may well have been killed by now, there's no evidence of that one way or another in most cases. And in many cases, there has been little or no public acknowledgement by either families or kidnappers that the hostages have gone missing.

The ones we do hear about come in fits and starts, marked by the release of another video of one of the captives, accompanied by implausible demands and bloodthirsty threats. The latest images, released March 7, showed three of the four Christian Peacemaker Team members kidnapped by insurgents last Nov. 26: Canadians Harmeet Sooden and James Loney and Briton Norman Kember, but not the fourth hostage, American Tom Fox . Three days later, Fox's body was found outside Baghdad, his throat savagely slit and with a gunshot wound to the head. There has been no word on the fate of the others. The Christian Peacemaker Team is a Quaker pacifist group that has worked in Iraq since early in the war. The four were kidnapped in Baghdad on Nov. 26--and after their disappearance they were quickly replaced by others, including several Americans. "Despite the risks that have driven most foreigners in Iraq into heavily guarded enclaves, we still live in a neighborhood in Baghdad," says Beth Pyles, a West Virginian who has been here since January. "It's not that we're brave, we're just in love with some amazing people who are here. We are people who eschew guns and violence in all its forms," she said, adding that this belief precluded them from hiring guards. "[Fox] was very aware of the risks and he took these knowingly," says Maxine Nash, an Iowan among the team that replaced Fox. "He felt very strongly that the value of the work made it worth being here."

Many more hostages quietly disappear from the streets of Baghdad and for a variety of reasons, no one discloses what happens to them—until they show up either dead, or as sometimes happens, rescued or released. Foreign contractors working in Iraq routinely suppress news of hostage-takings, both to discourage other opportunists from targeting their people, and to allow for secret negotiations for their release. When there's hope of paying a ransom for their loved ones' return, many families also don't go public—and in many cases don't go to authorities either. Of the 14 Americans kidnapped in Iraq and still missing, only six have been publicly identified—including journalist Jill Carroll. Nine of the 14 are Americans with dual Iraqi-U.S. citizenship. In such instances, there's good reason for secrecy, in the hopes that the kidnappers won't learn they're holding American citizens—which at best would vastly increase the ransoms demanded, and at worst might guarantee they were killed by Islamic extremists. So far, at least 40 Americans have been kidnapped in all, with at least seven known to have been killed. About half were freed or released.

Since the beginning of the war, according to U.S. government figures, 430 foreigners have been taken hostage in Iraq. And although U.S. officials do not release names except when families ask them to do so, press accounts have identified at least 43 foreigners from 12 different countries who are apparently still being held. That is almost certainly an incomplete tally and would not necessarily account for many who have been quietly ransomed out of captivity or who died and whose bodies have not been found. In addition, not all foreigners who go missing are reported to officials. Of those 430, at least 54 have been executed by their captors, according to a tally by Reuters. Fox would be the 55th.

These numbers are small in comparison to the kidnappings of Iraqis, which take place at the rate of 10-30 per day, mainly for purposes of ransom. The average ransom paid by Iraqi families is now $30,000, according to a U.S. official. Thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since the war began, some by common criminals and some by terrorists. The most outrageous example was this week’s mass kidnapping of 33 security guards from the Al Rafidah Company, a private Iraqi security company in eastern Baghdad; they were taken captive by 10 truckloads of men disguised as Iraqi policemen. Official sources say the kidnappings are believed to be for ransom. "Kidnappings have become a bank for terrorists to fund their operations," says Muahad Saleh, who is in charge of kidnapping investigations at the Ministry of Interior. In addition, many criminals are believed to have sold their foreign captives to Al Qaeda or other extremist groups, which are believed to pay high bounties for Westerners—especially Americans. After Carroll, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped Jan. 7, she was initially shown in a video wearing her normal street clothes. In subsequent videos, she was shown in full hijab ¸ the headdress and long gown normally worn by conservative Iraqi women, suggesting that she might have been traded by her initial captors, who had identified themselves as belonging to a previously unknown group.