BAGHDAD, Iraq – A senior U.S. military spokesman said yesterday that an Iraqi-American soldier kidnapped in Baghdad 10 days ago was believed to be alive and in the hands of his original captors.
Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell identified the soldier as 41-year-old reservist Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie and said al-Taayie was visiting his in-laws and his wife Oct. 23, the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, when he was abducted by three carloads of armed men.
The military has conducted intensive searches for the soldier, who moved to the United States as a teenager and returned to Iraq as a translator in the Army Reserve in November 2005, Caldwell said.
Al-Taayie's in-laws said his wife, Israa Abdul-Satar, 26, a local science student, and two of her siblings had tried to fight off the abductors when they came to grab him.
“I told him that he should be careful and to watch out, because all eyes are on us,” said Abdul Satar, al-Taayie's father-in-law, as he sat in the family's one-bedroom, second-floor apartment in the middle-class neighborhood of Karrada, in central Baghdad.
Shaimaa Abdul Satar, Israa's younger sister, said she was walking with the couple and her brother Omar to al-Taayie's motorcycle a block away from her parents' house about 4:30 p.m. when two armed men pulled up and tried to force al-Taayie into a white Mercedes.
They fought the men off and took shelter in an uncle's nearby apartment, Shaimaa said, but about five minutes later three cars with no license plates arrived, and armed men stormed the building and abducted al-Taayie.
Omar knew the leader of the group and initially went with them, she said. But after pleading with the men to release al-Taayie, she said, Omar was warned to get out of the car or they would kidnap him, too. He was released as the vehicle appeared to be heading to the Shiite slum of Sadr City in east Baghdad, Shaimaa said.
“At this point, we believe the ones who kidnapped Ahmed currently still have him,” Caldwell said. He did not identify who the U.S. military believes abducted the soldier.
Shaimaa and others in her family identified the leader of the group that kidnapped al-Taayie as a local gangster, Abu Rami. His real name, they said, is Majid al-Qaissy. They said he is a Sunni Arab, as is their family and al-Taayie's.
The Associated Press reported yesterday, however, that the wife's family was Shiite.
The New York Times quoted al-Taiyie's mother, Nawal, who was speaking from Ann Arbor, Mich., as saying that the al-Taiyie family has both Sunni and Shiite forebears on both sides. “Mention this, the family is mixed, Shiite and Sunni,” she said. “Ahmed doesn't care, Sunni or Shiite.”
Al-Taiyie's in-laws told the AP last week that he had been abducted by members of the Mahdi army, a militia loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The in-laws said the couple had married in secret three months ago, an apparent violation of Army rules.
But Caldwell said yesterday that al-Taiyie was married in February 2005, well before he was deployed to Iraq, and no Army rules were violated.
The couple took a delayed honeymoon to Egypt this year.
The New York Times reported that in 1997, al-Taiyie and a neighbor became involved, flew to Las Vegas and got married. The woman was Jewish, and her parents were against her marrying a Muslim, friends said. The couple divorced amicably four years later.
Al-Taiyie's parents described him as a man who, searching for a cause and career, found both in Iraq.
