URGENT: 50 kidnapped Indian nurses moved to Mosul

(IraqiNews.com) The Indian Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday that about 50 Indian nurses were taken away against their will from a hospital in Tikrit, Iraq, which is controlled by members of the organization of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

The Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Syed Akbar Iddin, declined to give the identity of the party that forced them to leave the hospital or to the party that they were taken away.

He was asked if the nurses were abducted, he said: “In areas of conflict there is no free will”. A senior aide to Prime Minister of Kerala Omin Chande, who spoke Thursday to the nurses, said to Reuters that “militants” forced the nurses to evacuate the hospital and ride buses.

But relatives of some of the nurses, who had been in contact with them over telephone said that ISIS militants had moved the group towards Mosul, a town about 225 km away which they also control and where 40 Indian construction workers were kidnapped two weeks ago with 39 of them are still in custody.

The Hindustan Times reported that shortly before being bundled off on a bus, one of the nurses said over the telephone that the militants were planning to move them to Mosul.

“We have no other option but to obey them,” said Sona Joseph, the nurse, sounding desperate and fearful.

“Our government wasted precious time. Now they can send enough coffins to take us back.”

Underlining the potential danger to the lives of the nurses, at least five of them sustained injuries, possibly from splinters from a blast, while being moved out of the hospital compound, said K Johnny, a relative of one of the nurses.

Of the five, three received head injuries. But we have no idea whether they are getting some treatment,” he said.

“Three phones are ringing now but nobody is picking them. It seems rebels might have seized them.”

All the nurses are from Kerala. The state’s chief minister Oommen Chandy, who met foreign minister Sushma Swaraj on Thursday to help secure safe passage for the nurses, confirmed “an incident” near the hospital in which 2-3 nurses had been hurt. He gave no further detail.

Asked about reports of an explosion near the Tikrit Teaching Hospital as the nurses left, Akbaruddin said he was not aware of a blast, but that some nurses had been lightly injured by broken glass.

He said Indian embassy officials in Baghdad had spoken to some of the nurses as they left Tikrit, the birthplace of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein which has seen fierce fighting this week as Iraqi troops began trying to regain control of the city from ISIS militants.

There are nearly 10 thousand Indian workers in Iraq mostly in areas that were not affected by the fighting, but dozens of them returned to India since the beginning of the offensive of the organization of the Islamic state in Iraq and the Levant.