Baghdad - Eighteen Turkish construction workers who were
kidnapped in Baghdad last week appeared in a video on Friday, apparently being
held by a group that threatened to attack Turkish interests in Iraq unless
Ankara met its demands.
The three-minute clip circulated online showed five
masked gunmen wearing black under a familiar Shi'ite slogan and the title
"death squad", but it was not immediately clear to which group they
belonged.
The authenticity of the video could not be verified and
officials in Turkey and Iraq were not immediately available to comment.
Iraqi security forces investigating the Turks' abduction
raided the Baghdad headquarters of Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Iranian-backed
Shi'ite militia, last Friday but without result.
Demands made in the video reveal a complex web of
alliances and rivalries involving parties to both Iraq's regional splintering
and Syria's civil war.
The video shows eighteen men wearing T-shirts and
kneeling in front of the gunmen. The men state their names and the Turkish
provinces they come from.
One of them then addresses Turkish President Tayyip
Erdogan.
"We are foreign workers who have come here to earn
our bread... We are now victims as a result of some foreign policies, some
meaningless, inconsistent business."
Oil and land
The gunmen do not speak, but demands are displayed on the
screen. They include stopping the passage of militants from Turkey to Iraq,
cutting the flow of "stolen oil" from Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan
region, and ordering the Army of Conquest to lift the siege of Kefraya and
al-Foua, Shi'ite Muslim villages in northwest Syria.
"In case these demands are not met by Erdogan and
his party, we will crush the Turkish interests and their agents in Iraq by the
most violent means," the text reads.
The Army of Conquest is an insurgent alliance in
neighbouring Syria, which includes that country's al-Qaeda wing Nusra Front and
has captured Idlib province.
A Sunni group, it has been targeting the Shi'ite Muslim
villages of Kefraya and al-Foua in the province at the same time as Hezbollah
and the Syrian army have been trying to seize the Syrian town of Zabadani close
to the Lebanese border.
The video makes no specific threat to the workers and
sets no deadline for a response.
The Turkish company which employs them confirmed their
identity, but said it had no further information.
"We are in contact with the families, the foreign
ministry and Turkey's Baghdad embassy," Ugur Dogan, the chief executive of
Turkey's Nurol Holding, told Reuters.
Damascus says foreign jihadi fighters allowed into Syrian
territory by Turkey have played a pivotal role in Sunni Islamist militant gains
in that area. Islamic State swept across the Syrian border in June 2014 and
seized nearly a third of Iraq's territory.
The northern Kurdistan region, asserting autonomy from
Baghdad, has ramped up independent oil sales in the past few months via a
pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
