Two of the 18 Turkish workers kidnapped in Baghdad this month have been released near the southern oil city of Basra, the Turkish ambassador in Baghdad said on Wednesday.
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All those abducted are employees of Nurol Holding, a Turkish construction firm that is now carrying out development projects in the Iraqi capital. Al-Zaidi told The Associated Press that both were in good health, without elaborating. “They said the other 16 were also in good health as of yesterday (Tuesday)”.
“Two of our 18 fellow citizen abducted in Baghdad have been released. The two released workers are Necdet Yılmaz and Ercan Özpilavcı”, Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgiç told the Doğan News Agency.
Last week, the hostages appeared in a video from a previously unknown militant group presenting itself as Shiite.
Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region is independently exporting oil via Turkey in a move the federal government considers illegal – a point of contention between Baghdad and Ankara.
While Turkish and Iraqi officials and security forces were investigating the incident, the militants released a video on September 11 of the hostages identifying themselves and pleading for Ankara to meet the group’s conditions.
“We call for releasing the captives and stopping these practices”, which harm Islam, he added.
It is not clear if the gunmen belong to an established group. Provincial council member Jaber al-Saedi said they had been found in front of a hospital being built by a Turkish company.
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“The Turks – the Turkish intelligence – are the ones who ease the entrance of large numbers of Daesh (Islamic State), including suicide bombers, from Turkey to Syria and from Syria to Iraq, killing Iraqis by hundreds and thousands”, Reuters reported Khazali as saying in an interview with Iraqi state TV.
