Russians, other foreigners leave in fear

About 40 foreigners have been taken hostage in Iraq.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein didn't scare electrical engineer Jamal Polatov away. Neither did the U.S. airstrikes that shattered the Iraqi Army, nor the suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and grenade attacks that have bedeviled the U.S. occupation of Iraq for nearly a year.
But on Thursday, the Russian native left for Moscow, joining a growing exodus of contract workers fleeing shadowy insurgents trying to drive out the foreigners. The insurgents' latest tactic -- taking hostages -- is working.
"A week ago they kidnapped seven or eight Russians. So we decided to leave," said Polatov, 55, a fluent Arabic speaker who has been working on and off in Iraq for about 20 years. "We're afraid of the terrorists," he said, casting the kidnappers as a fringe element. "The Iraqis are our friends."
Yet a corner of Baghdad International Airport was awash with Russian contract workers, dourly smoking cigarettes and going on a duty-free shopping spree. In the space of an afternoon, the Moscow-based energy firm Tekhnoprom evacuated its entire 370-member staff in three special Russian-made Ilyushin charter flights. The flights were sent days after eight employees were abducted, then freed in a week-old churn of kidnappings.
About 40 hostages
In all, about 40 foreigners have been taken hostage in Iraq. Most have been released. On Thursday, the longest-known held among them -- three Japanese -- were released after a Sunni tribal leader intervened.
The three hostages -- aid workers Noriaki Imai, 18, and Nahoko Takato, 34, and free-lance photojournalist Soichiro Konyama, 32 -- arrived in the United Arab Emirates today for medical checkups and to meet up with relatives before returning home, a Japanese official in Dubai said.
On April 8, a previously unknown insurgent Iraqi group released a tape carrying footage of the three hostages blindfolded, surrounded by gunmen and forced at gunpoint to lie on a concrete floor. The group threatened to burn them alive after three days of airing the tape unless the Japanese government pull out its 500 troops helping with reconstruction in southern Iraq.
Today, a Danish businessman was thought to have been kidnapped in Iraq, Denmark's Foreign Ministry said, while a Chinese citizen was reportedly released.
Danish public television DR-1 reported that he was a businessman in his 30s and working on a sewage project in Iraq. The man was traveling from the southern Iraqi city of Basra to Baghdad when he was taken captive in Tadji, 20 miles north of Basra, DR-1 said.
The Chinese man was released today, two days after being taken into captivity, said Muthanna Harith, a member of the Islamic Clerics Committee, the highest Sunni organization in Iraq.
The committee earlier had worked for the release of the three Japanese hostages.
Execution reported
But on Wednesday, the first known foreigner was reported executed. Italian citizen Fabrizio Quattrocchi, 35, who worked as a security guard for a U.S. defense contractor, was shot in the head in videotape too grisly to show on the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel. Quattrocchi was among four Italians taken hostage this week.
So, in another terminal on Thursday, European and Arab businessmen streamed onto two shuttles to neighboring Jordan -- part routine rotation travel, part retreat from the worrying security situation.
"It's the best time to leave," said Mahmoud Maghrabi, 51, managing director of the Iraq office of Caterpillar, as he headed to Cairo for two weeks of vacation. He declared that even a fellow Arab like himself, an Egyptian, wasn't off-limits to the hostage takers.
"We're accused of helping the American Army," he said glumly. "We're helping the people -- why kidnap them?"
Officials' response
Coalition officials, for their part, dismissed Thursday's departures as inconsequential.
Iraqi reconstruction efforts can continue, a senior coalition official said, because for every contractor that leaves, there are plenty more workers waiting.
But a senior adviser to an Iraqi governing official called it a worrying trend. He'd spent three hours that morning at the normally sleepy Royal Jordanian ticket counter, picking up tickets for a three-week trip to London, and found it in "chaos."
"It was like the fall of Saigon," said the man, who asked not to be named. "People were reaching over the counter. There was a mild hysteria."