IRAQ: Insurgents kidnapped the senior official in Iraq's rebellious Anbar province yesterday as the deadline set by the captors of an Australian hostage passed with no word on his fate.
Raja Nawaf, who only became governor of Anbar a few days ago, was abducted with four bodyguards and taken to Ramadi, his brother Hamed Nawaf reported.
The kidnappers, supporters of the Iraq al-Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are demanding that Nawaf's tribe release some of the militant leader's followers it is holding.
Although it appears to be a tit-for-tat turf war, the fighting showed that some Iraqis are putting up resistance to Zarqawi, whose followers have kidnapped and beheaded foreigners and launched suicide bomb attacks that have killed hundreds.
"Hamed's tribe has kidnapped some of Zarqawi's people to force them to release him," said a member of the Ramadi city council. "And Zarqawi's people have kidnapped some of Hamed's tribes."
That hostage drama played out as a deadline set by an insurgent group holding 63-year-old Australian engineer Douglas Wood expired.
In a video shown on al-Jazeera television last week, Wood looked distraught as two masked insurgents pointed rifles at him. His head was shaved and he appeared to have a black eye.
Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer said there had been no word about Wood's fate.
"We haven't heard anything . . . We just don't know what to think and we are continuing to work on the case," he said.
A new batch of 450 Australian soldiers is due to arrive soon in southern Iraq, taking the total of Australian troops in and around Iraq to about 1,400.
Japan, another US ally in Iraq, was also grappling with a hostage crisis. One of Iraq's most feared insurgent groups, the army of Ansar al-Sunna, said it had ambushed a foreign security convoy near a US base in western Iraq and captured a Japanese citizen. A picture of the man's passport posted on the internet gave his name as Akihiko Saito (44).
The group said it had captured Mr Saito after ambushing a convoy carrying 12 Iraqis and five foreigners near the town of Hit in Anbar province. It said all those in the convoy except Mr Saito were killed.
Japanese media said Mr Saito was a 20-year veteran of the French Foreign Legion.
In Baghdad, insurgents kept up the pressure on the new government with two more suicide car bomb attacks, killing eight people and wounding more than 20, police said.
The past few weeks have seen a sharp escalation in guerrilla attacks. Yesterday a suicide bomber blew himself up near a US military patrol in central Baghdad, killing eight Iraqis. A second suicide bomber targeted a base for the Baghdad river police on the banks of the Tigris, wounding three policemen.
US troops have also suffered heavy losses in the surge in violence. Four marines were killed in three attacks in western Iraq on Monday, bringing to 14 the number of American troops killed in action in Iraq since Saturday. - (Reuters)