NEW DELHI: Iraq says India could use the Turkish example to try and free its 39 workers from ISIS captivity.
“When our army retakes those areas, and if we find the Indian hostages still there, we will keep them safe,” said Iraqi foreign minister Ibrahim Al Jaafari. But looking doubtful, Al Jaafari added, “One should have no expectations of this terror group. Their brutality and inhumanity are new lows in human behaviour,” Jafari said in an interview with the Times Of India.
When ISIS (known by its Arabic name Daesh in this region) overran Mosul in northern Iraq in June, it captured 49 Turks from Turkey’s mission there. Turkey succeeded in freeing its hostages in September this year , even while the Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Tayyip Erdogan denied that any ransom had been paid for the hostages.
But subsequent news reports suggested that Turkey may have exchanged its nationals for an unspecified number of ISIS militants in its prisons. The Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan indicated to the media this could be possible, he was quoted as saying that Israel too had released 1,500 Palestinians in return for one of their own.
It is impossible that India would be able to negotiate with ISIS on the issue of the 39 hostages in ISIS custody , without raising several questions , being so far away from Iraq.
Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj told Indian Parliament last week that the government continued to hunt for the Indian hostages through a secretive channel. Informing Parliament of the latest state of negotiations, Swaraj admitted that while she had no concrete proof of life, she couldn’t say with any certainty that they were dead either. The government, she said, would continue the search. A media report had quoted Shafi and Hassan, two Bangladeshis, who claimed that they had been released by their IS captors after segregating them from Indians, as saying that the 39 Indian hostages were killed. .
Elaborating on the threat from Daesh, Iraqi foreign minister Al Jaafari, appealed to the governments to unite, as it was fighting a global war against terrorism. “They are not limited to a certain country. It’s true they are in Iraq now but the members of Daesh (ISIS) span five continents — Asia, Africa, America, Europe and Australia. They recruited people from all continents for this fight. This means we are in the frontline of globalized terrorism. And we must retaliate with a global response,” he said.
Calling for assistance from other countries, Al Jaafari told the Manama Dialogue (an annual meet on Gulf security by International Institute for Strategic Studies) that ISIS represented no religion and it was imperative to confront it, including the young generation before it spread its tentacles in other societies. He ascribed the terrorist attack in Canada’s Parliament earlier this year to the spread of ISIS’s ideology and practices.
Al Jaafari’s plea to the region came even as Iran confirmed that it had carried out air strikes against ISIS positions in northern Iraq on the request of the Iraqi government. Al Jaafari himself said air strikes from “friendly” countries were permissible if they conformed to UN Security Council recommendations.
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