Turkish Deputy PM, who is in New York to attend the 70th session of the UN General Assembly, tweeted on September 30 that 16 Turkish workers were handed over to the Turkish Embassy in Iraq. “I talked to a few of them on the phone”, he wrote. Two of the workers were freed two weeks later.
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A Turkish plane carrying the workers from the Iraqi capital Baghdad landed at an Ankara airport, where they were embraced by their relatives.
The men were kidnapped September 2 in the Sadr City neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
Ibrahim told the AP that the workers were found Wednesday in the town of Musayyib, about 40 miles south of Baghdad.
He did not provide information on the circumstances of the release. With the 16 freed hostages alongside him, Keymakci told reporters in Baghdad on Wednesday that the incident “will not weaken bilateral relations…and Turkish investments in Iraq”.
Davutoglu said that all 16 workers were in good health and added that efforts were now underway to bring the victims back home to Turkey at the earliest.
In the video released after the kidnapping, the militants threatened to attack Turkish interests if their demands for Turkey to halt the flow of Sunni jihadi militants into Iraq and to order rebel forces to stop besieging Shiite villages in Syria were not met. In June 2014, militants from the terrorist group Islamic State took 49 employees of the Turkish consulate in Mosul in northern Iraq hostage.
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Turkey’s second largest trading partner is Iraq, where Turkish construction and contracting companies play a leading role.
