From New York Times Online 29 November 2005:

Militants in Iraq Threaten to Kill German Archaeologist
By KIRK SEMPLE
and RICHARD BERNSTEIN

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 29 - A prominent German archaeologist and aid worker who had lived and worked in Iraq for years has been kidnapped, the German government confirmed today as images of her surrounded by masked, armed men were broadcast on international television.

The kidnappers threatened to kill the archaeologist, Susanne Osthoff, unless Berlin stopped cooperating with the Iraqi government, according to a videotape delivered to the German state broadcaster ARD. A still image from the tape showed two blindfolded people flanked by three men, their faces concealed by kaffiyehs. One of the men held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Ms. Osthoff was kidnapped with her driver, whose name was not released. She is the first German national to be kidnapped in Iraq.

News of Ms. Osthoff's abduction came as the aid group Christian Peacemaker Teams confirmed that four Westerners taken hostage on Saturday in a neighborhood in western Baghdad were workers for the organization. The group said that Norman Kember, a 74-year-old Briton, was among the missing workers, who also included an American and two Canadians. An official from the American Embassy in Baghdad declined today to name the kidnapped American or even to confirm the affiliation of that American, saying, "We're engaged with the family on all these issues."

The Arabic language television station Al Jazeera broadcast a videotape today purportedly showing the four Westerners, including Mr. Kember. On the tape, the kidnappers, who said they were from a previously unknown group called Swords of Truth, accused their captives of being "spies of the occupying forces."

The wave of abductions suggested that after a yearlong lull in kidnappings, the tactic might be regaining currency as a preferred tool of intimidation by the insurgency, which is seeking to topple the American-backed government and drive foreign troops and business interests out of the country. More than 200 foreigners have been abducted since the American invasion 31 months ago. Dozens of the captives have been killed in captivity and about 20 remain missing.

Kidnappings - and their ghoulish corollary, videotaped beheadings - reached a peak in the fall of 2004 and paralyzed the foreign community of government officials, executives, aid workers and journalists, who severely restricted their movements and beefed up security measures.

During the American military siege on the insurgent stronghold of Falluja last November, troops discovered a number of bunkers where captives had apparently been held and tortured. Following the Falluja offensive, kidnappings of foreigners fell off dramatically and car bombs became the foreign community's greatest threat.

Militant Shiite opponents of the American-led international presence in Iraq are believed to have committed two of the most recent high-profile kidnappings and murders of foreigners, both journalists. Rory Carroll, a reporter for The Guardian, was abducted in October in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad but released unharmed after a day in captivity. In August, Steven Vincent, an American freelance journalist researching a book in Basra, was also abducted and killed.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, facing her first crisis since taking office last week, called on Ms. Osthoff's kidnappers today to release the archaeologist. "We condemn this act in the harshest possible terms," Mrs. Merkel said in a brief statement to the press. "We urgently appeal to the perpetrators to hand both of them over into safe custody."

Mrs. Merkel said that the government had set up a crisis committee to deal with the kidnapping, and she told Ms. Osthoff's family in Germany that everything would be done to secure her release.

"They can rest assured," Mrs. Merkel said of the family, "that the government will do everything in its power to bring both the kidnapped to safety and to secure their lives."

Ms. Osthoff's kidnapping was already riveting a German public that has long been among Europe's most skeptical in its attitude toward the Iraq war, which Germany has opposed from the beginning. Germany has consistently refused to send troops to Iraq, and Mrs. Merkel has vowed not to change that policy. But she has also said she would continue Germany's ongoing training of Iraqi police in the United Arab Emirates, an activity that the kidnappers apparently were referring to in their demand that Germany stop cooperating with the Iraqi government.

In a broadcasting decision reminiscent of the response in France to the kidnapping of Florence Aubenas, a French journalist, and her driver earlier this year, German television focused all day on Ms. Osthoff and her activities in Iraq, which combined efforts to preserve the country's archaeological treasures and to provide it with medical aid.

"She has been bringing medicine and medical equipment to Iraq for years," Ms. Osthoff's mother, who has been identified in the German press only as Ingrid H., said on German television. "We are always alarmed when something happens there."

Ms. Osthoff, the German press reported, has lived in Iraq for many years and is fluent in Arabic. She was married to an Iraqi man but the couple divorced some years ago. Ms. Osthoff has a 10-year-old daughter who lives in a boarding school in southern Germany.

After news of Ms. Osthoff's kidnapping became known here, a German newspaper, the Neue Osnabrücker Zeiting, reported that Ms. Osthoff had been targeted by extremist groups close to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during the summer, when she was living in Mosul in northern Iraq. At the time, the newspaper said, Ms. Osthoff was escorted by American soldiers to Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. Since then, Ms. Osthoff has been negotiating both with the German Embassy in Baghdad and the local Kurdish-dominated government in the northern town of Arbil to build a German cultural center there, the newspaper said.

It was unclear whether she was accompanied by security guards, a basic precaution taken by most Westerners traveling and working in Iraq.

The four aid workers who went missing over the weekend were apparently not traveling in the company of security guards.

A human rights advocate in Baghdad, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Christian Peacemaker Teams have acted with reckless disregard for their own safety by moving unprotected through communities generally hostile to the foreign presence. The rights advocate said the group's representatives were entering mosques in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods to offer their services in helping find missing family members, were accompanying families fleeing to the border, and were trying to organize prison visits for relatives of inmates.

The organization has declared its opposition to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. But even so, many of the groups that have claimed responsibility for recent kidnappings have also claimed links to Mr. Zarqawi, whose animosity toward Christians and Jews is redolent in nearly all his pronouncements.

Like the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, most major international aid and reconstruction organizations have pulled most of their foreign staff from Iraq. Some of the smaller organizations that have remained have demonstrated a cavalier attitude toward personal safety, traveling without bodyguards and entering neighborhoods and regions considered generally hostile toward the American-led foreign presence.