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Al Qaeda group claims to hold Americans, Russians BAGHDAD: A group linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq said yesterday it had abducted two US soldiers and four Russian diplomats as thousands of troops scoured the countryside for the missing men. "Your brothers in the military wing of the Mujahideen Shura Council kidnapped two American soldiers near Yusufiya," the group said. "We will provide you with more details about the incident in the next coming days," it added. Some 8,000 US and Iraqi troops, supported by aircraft, were hunting for the two missing soldiers, who have not been seen since an attack on Friday night on a checkpoint south of Baghdad in which a fellow soldier was killed. Seven US troops were wounded in the search operations for the missing Americans, officials said. "The American military has made very clear that they are going to do everything possible – I think they’ve said air, land and sea – to try and find them," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Washington. The missing soldiers have been identified as Private Thomas Lowell Tucker, 25, from Madras, Oregon and Private Kristian Menchaca, 23, from Houston, Texas. The US military is still looking for Keith Maupin, the only other missing soldier. He was abducted on April 9, 2004, when his convoy was ambushed in Baghdad. The Mujahideen Shura Council’s statement said the abduction was but "the latest incident showing the weakness of the so-called US intelligence services and their confusion in Iraq." Al Qaeda vowed to hit back after its leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a US air strike on June 7. The group has killed several foreign hostages, some by beheading. The Mujahideen Shura Council, made up of Al Qaeda and other militant groups, said it was also holding four Russian diplomats and gave Moscow 48 hours to pull out from Chechnya and free Muslim prisoners, according to an Internet statement. The group said it had abducted the four and killed a fifth in an attack on June 3 in Baghdad. "God enabled the lions of unification to capture four Russian diplomats in Iraq and kill a fifth," the statement said. Russia has withheld comment on the killing of Zarqawi in a US raid on June 7, a silence seen in Moscow as an attempt to safeguard the lives of the four Russian hostages. "We know in advance that there will be appeals ... to release those (hostages) under the pretext that Russia took a clear stand in rejecting the (US-led) war on Iraq," the council statement said. The response is that "we fight the enemies of God in order to establish God’s rule on earth ... and every Muslim ... is our brother," it said. It accused the Russian government of "killing and displacing ... our people in Chechnya and Afghanistan" and of "sending its diplomats to Iraq to support the crusader enterprise led by America" and "confer legitimacy" on the US-backed Iraqi government. The dead Russian man has been named as Vitaly Titov. The four missing are Fyodor Zaytsev, Rinat Aglyulin, Anatoly Smirnov and Oleg Fedosseyev. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has told parliament in Moscow that "the foreign ministry and our special forces are doing all they can to find out what has become of" the diplomats. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, hoping to show that his new government is taking charge, said Iraqi forces would take control of the country’s southernmost province from a British-led multinational force in July. Maliki hailed it as a first step towards Iraqi forces taking responsibility for their own security. But Muthanna province is relatively quiet and is much easier to hand over than the violence-racked oil port city of Basra to the east or insurgent strongholds further north like Yusufiya, where the two US soldiers went missing. US troops tried to establish positions in south Ramadi, one of the most troublesome Sunni insurgent strongholds. A witness saw seven US tanks rumbling along the streets. ---------------------------------------------------
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