Making Innocents Pay for Other’s Sins

Nearly every day, militant groups take more hostages, often people like Briton Kenneth Bigley, who are employees of small companies working on Iraq's reconstruction.

The whereabouts of Bigley, who has a Thai wife, are unknown, although sadly there appears to be little reason to be optimistic about his fate. Two American colleagues who were abducted at the same time as the Briton have already been killed; their heads cut off in grisly fashion by their masked captors, who later posted a tape of the murders on the Internet.

The hostage-takers, who have been identified as members of a gang run by al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab Zarqawi, said the three men were seized to force the US and Iraq to release all women prisoners from US jails in the country.

But given there are only two such prisoners – both of whom were senior members of Saddam's Baath Party – it is clear their real aim was to sow fear among foreigners working in the country and the international community.

The effect of hostage-taking, however, goes beyond the generation of terror and publicity; it slows and drives up the costs of reconstruction and perhaps most significantly, adds to the kind of lawlessness in which radical Islam thrives.

What has become clear as a result of the abductions is the diverse and opportunistic nature of the opposition facing Washington and the interim Iraqi government. Most of the 20 or so groups involved in the kidnappings are Sunni, but some are Shi'ite. Some have specific targets, like employees of defence companies, others seem content to seize any foreigners, whether they are aid workers from Italy, French journalists from anti-war papers like Le Figaro, or Nepalese construction workers. Some like Zarqawi's group, Monotheism and Jihad, don't even have a political stake in Iraq. According to security agencies, his primary goals remain toppling the monarchy in his native Jordan and attacking Jewish targets in Israel and around the world.

The official Arab press has traditionally condemned hostage-takers like Zarqawi as thugs who pervert Islam. But it is clear most Arabs don't share this view. In a recent phone poll on Arab broadcaster al-Jazeera, 93 per cent of the respondents supported the kidnappings.

This is a sad reflection of how far the so-called relativism of suffering seems to have taken us in Iraq. That innocent people are dying in Fallujah is a tragedy but in no way does it excuse the disgraceful glee-taking in the execution of non-combatants, whether they be Western or Asian.

If kidnapping has a strategic goal it similarly fails because it has allowed the US to characterise Zarqawi as the "mad and foreign" personification of Iraqi resistance. Whatever perceived crimes, mistakes or sins the US and British governments have committed in Iraq, or their insurgent opponents for that matter, there is simply no justification for the killing of civilians, whether they be engineers like Bigley or babies in Fallujah.