I hope you sleep well tonite...........
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American Iraq Hostage on TV?
(CBS/AP) TV footage on Saturday showed Iraqi insurgents holding a foreigner, apparently American, prisoner in a car after fighting outside Baghdad the day before, the latest in a rash of kidnappings of foreigners in Iraq during this week's violence.
Meanwhile, a group calling itself the "Marytr Ahmed Yassin Brigades" in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad and Fallujah, claimed in footage shown on Arab media to have 30 hostages from a variety of countries, including the U.S.
But the footage, obtained by APTN and aired on Al-Arabiya TV, showed no images of any hostages, and there was no way to verify the group's claims.
The prisoner, spoke with an American accent and had a bandage on his arm and blood and dirt on his jeans, was shown sitting in the back seat of a car, with a masked gunman next to him waving an automatic rifle, on the main highway on Baghdad's western edge where fighting took place Friday.
The footage, taken by a cameraman from Australia's ABC television and broadcast in Australia on Saturday, was filmed Friday. The prisoner, speaking through the car's open window, identified himself as Thomas Hamill and said he was part of a convoy that was attacked.
When asked by an ABC reporter what happened, the man said: "They attacked our convoy. That's all I'm going to say."
The car then drove off quickly down the highway with Hamill still in the back seat, passing a burning tanker truck on the road. The prisoner, who had light hair and a moustache, wore what appeared to be a light flak jacket of the sort worn by private security guards, who are often contracted to protect convoys.
Gunmen attacked a fuel convoy Friday in Abu Ghreib on the main highway outside Baghdad, setting a tanker on fire and killing one U.S. soldier and an Iraqi driver.
ABC's foreign editor, Peter Cave, said he and the cameraman had arrived at Abu Ghreib to cover the fighting. A car pulled up to him and masked, armed men got out and told the cameraman to record images of a man in the back of the car.
Insurgents elsewhere in Iraq have kidnapped three Japanese, a Canadian and an Arab from Jerusalem. Those holding the Japanese have threatened to kill them unless Tokyo withdraws its troops from Iraq by Sunday, a demand Japan's prime minister has refused.
Two U.S. servicemen and several contract employees were still unaccounted for from attacks on Friday, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Commander Dan Hetlage, said Saturday.
A British citizen and two German security officials from their country's embassy in Baghdad are also missing, though it is not known if they have been kidnapped. A Canadian and an Arab from Jerusalem have also been abducted.
The Marytr Ahmed Yassin Brigades video showed a masked man holding an automatic weapon, saying, "We demand the withdrawal of all American forces and their allies. ... "If the siege of Fallujah is not lifted, we will cut off (the hostages') heads."
He claimed that his fighters had killed four American soldiers and said "we have their bodies."
The footage showed an image of a body with clothes covered in blood that the gunman claimed was that of an American soldier. The body's face could not be seen and there were no characteristic suggesting the nationality.
In violence and related developments around Iraq Saturday:
Marines have moved a third battalion near Fallujah to join siege of city, where two battalions of around 1,200 Marines are already in place, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday.
Kimmitt said Marines would end their sel-imposed 24-hour-old pause in offensive operations in Fallujah if discussions between Iraqi politicians and Fallujah city officials do not produce results.
"There is a third batallion of Marines," Kimmitt said. "Were we not at this point observing suspension of offensive operations, I think we would have been much further along, and it could well have been that we would have had the entire the city by this point," he told reporters in Baghdad.
Earlier Saturday, Kimmitt called on Sunni militants in Fallujah to join in a bilateral cease-fire. The insurgents did not immediately respond.
Bloody fighting has been raging in Fallujah all week, but a team of Iraqi Governing Council members entered the city to hold talks with local leaders Saturday, trying to win the handover of people who killed and mutilated four American civilians last week. They also want the insurgents to give up foreign militants in the city, council member Mahmoud Othman said.
Many council memebers are getting increasingly angry over the Fallujah siege.
Explosions and sporadic gunfire were heard in Fallujah Saturday afternoon, and Marines largely remained in the industrial zone they hold in the eastern part of the city, 35 miles west of Baghdad.
The death toll for U.S. troops killed across Iraq this week stood at 46 Saturday. The fighting has killed more than 460 Iraqis - including more than 280 in Fallujah, a hospital official said. At least 647 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.
Insurgents attacked U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces north of Baghdad in Baquoba, sparking fierce overnight battles that left at least 40 Iraqis dead and several soldiers wounded, a U.S. military spokesman said on Saturday.
Among those killed were at least 11 civilians, said Dr. Fouad Hussein at Baqouba General Hospital. Thirty-five others were injured, he said.
Further north, gunmen in the northern city of Kirkuk attacked Iraqi security forces, killing two and kidnapping three Kurdish officers, a commander of the Iraqi force said.
A top Iraqi Red Crescent official and his wife were killed Saturday in apparent attack on their car in northern Iraq, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
Guerrillas attacked a tank on a highway near the airport in western Baghdad on Saturday, setting it on fire.
Also in the west of the city, a convoy of supply trucks being escorted by two U.S. Humvees was attacked. One of the trucks was set ablaze and the driver kidnapped, said Majid Hameed, a witness. The kidnapping could not be confirmed and the driver's nationality was not known.
Insurgents also fought U.S. troops in Baghdad's northern, mainly Sunni neighborhood of al-Azamiyah.
While violence continued elsewhere in Iraq on Saturday, there was relative quiet in the south - where the militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has waged an uprising against coalition forces, seizing several cities.
Leaders of al-Sadr's militia said Saturday that they would not launch attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces in the holy city of Karbala, 65 miles south of Baghdad, until the end of a religious festival this weekend.
U.S. commanders also have suggested they will hold off on trying to uproot al-Sadr's militia from Karbala and nearby Najaf and Kufa until after the al-Arbaeen ceremonies.
In their first major military move into south in months, around 1,000 U.S. troops backed by tanks swept into the city of Kut on Wednesday to push out al-Sadr militiamen who had seized control. Brig. Gen. Kimmitt said Friday al-Sadr followers were driven from much of Kut in the initial assault, and he expected the rest of the city to be under U.S. control soon.
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