Rescue Details

Rescued hostages release first statement - exclusive Mudville audio here.

Tanks' fer Nuttin':

Maxine Nash, a member of the Christian Peacemakers Team in Baghdad, said that the group is considering leaving Iraq. She conceded that the pacifist hostages had mixed feelings about being rescued by the military.

“Our mandate is violence reduction, so this was a tough call. Before they were kidnapped, both Tom and Jim had said they didn't want to be rescued,” Ms. Nash said.

The security source who described the schism among the abductors said that the former hostages had denounced the U.S. occupation of Iraq after they were freed. Attempts to debrief them were unsuccessful and no gratitude was offered to the soldiers for rescuing them.

It's not funny though - in fact it's tragic if it's true - information they divulge could be helpful in other cases. But for now that's just another element of the unconfirmed (but published) details concerning the hostage rescue.

The Guardian:

On the hostage video, the kidnappers claimed to be from a previously unknown group called the Sword of Truth. But intelligence officers had identified them as members of a Sunni insurgency group, either Jaish al-Mujahideen or al-Jabha al-Islamiya. From intelligence information, they were able to begin making arrests of suspects.

The British hostage Norman Kember and his two Canadian colleagues owe their freedom to a rift among their Iraqi kidnappers, a western security source close to the rescue operation said yesterday.

The source said their guards got cold feet when more senior and ruthless members of the group turned up at the house in Baghdad and took away a fourth hostage, Mr Kember's American colleague, Tom Fox, and shot him dead.
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The more senior members of the gang responsible for Mr Fox's murder were part of one of the Islamist insurgent groups, either Jaish al-Mujahideen or al-Jabha al-Islamiya. The group made a series of political demands, in particular that the US and Britain release all prisoners held in Iraq. They threatened to kill the hostages if their demands were not met.

But the guards holding Mr Kember and his colleagues were part of a cell motivated by money rather than politics. "It's a bit absurd that they consider themselves innocent, even though they were looking for money. They don't see themselves as criminals," the source said. "The guards were involved, which is why it was a soft operation. They played a significant role in allowing the authorities to find the hostages."

He added: "The death of Fox changed the whole thing. Someone higher up the chain took him away. Because the ante had gone up and it had become more serious, it's quite possible that the operation began to open up and they got nervous about the repercussion." He said the "higher-ups" who took Mr Fox did not initially intend to kill him. Examination of his body found dumped by a road two weeks ago did not show signs of torture, as first reported, the source insisted. Nor did he seem to have been killed execution-style. It was more likely that there was a scuffle or an attempt to run away which led to his death.

General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British Army, expressed the unhappiness of the military last night when he told Channel 4 News that he was “saddened that there doesn’t seem to have been a note of gratitude for the soldiers who risked their lives to save those lives”.

[Canadian Prime Minister Stephen] Harper did confirm Thursday, shortly after the men were rescued, that an unspecified number of Canadians have been embedded with coalition forces since the beginning of the war.