Search ends in a mound of despair

Govt deployed different diplomatic means, from rushing diplomats to Baghdad to using contacts in Mosul, to trace missing Indians but its efforts ended in vain

NEWDELHI: India’s ambassador to Iraq, Pradeep Singh Rajpurohit, told external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj in a phone call on Monday night that the Martyrs Foundation, an institution that deals with people killed in the fight against the Islamic State, would hold a press briefing at 11 am Iraqi time (1.30 pm India time) on Tuesday, officials familiar with the developments said.

The briefing was meant to bring closure to one of the longest searches for missing people in Iraq — of 39 Indian construction workers kidnapped in June 2014 by the IS. A 40th worker had escaped and said the rest of the workers had been killed — a claim refuted by the government.

The minister then decided to make a statement in parliament before the briefing in Iraq and asked her officials to arrange a standby press conference in case Parliament didn’t function. In the Rajya Sabha,she declared that the 39 Indians were dead.

“Our government does not believe in ‘missing, believed to be killed.’ I announced the death of the 39 Indians only after getting proof,” Swaraj said.

The kidnapping of the 40 workers in Iraq’s Mosul was one of the first crises confronted by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, which came to power in May 2014.

Closure took a long time coming. The government used all the diplomatic means that were available to it, but couldn’t obtain confirmation of the fate of the workers, keeping hopes alive that they may be alive, two persons familiar with the process said.

When the crisis flared, India had a new ambassador in Baghdad, Ajay Kumar. It rushed Suresh Reddy, a seasoned diplomat who is country’s present envoy to the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean), to Baghdad as the crisis manager. Reddy was the first Indian ambassador to Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. Reddy was sent there to rebuild up the mission in 2011.

“...we were up against an outfit (IS) that was making inroads fast and it is not easy for anyone to deal with such issues in a war zone-—a raging war at that,” said one of the officials cited above.

Getting credible information on the workers was a daunting task, he said. “The first task was to find local contacts, and that became all the more difficult once the Islamic State took over Mosul completely,” he added.

India was relying heavily on its contacts from Turkey and Palestine in Mosul, besides other neighbouring countries, for information on the fate of the workers.

Swaraj discussed the matter with her Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, on two occasions after the kidnapping. Prime Minister Narendra Modi also brought it up during interactions with Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.

Although updates emerged at frequent intervals, efforts to obtain a clear photo of the abductees went in vain. The contacts said the guards would not let them take any pictures. Then came reports that they were put to work at a food factory on the outskirts of Mosul for a while, and later shifted out to lay oil pipelines.

“Ascertaining the information provided by foreign contacts was always a problem. But Swaraj kept the hopes of their relatives alive, meeting them whenever they sought an appointment,” said the first official cited above.

The external affairs ministry opened a consulate at Erbil – 90 km from Mosul – and appointed Indian Foreign Service official Deepak Miglani as its consul general. Then came the input that the captives were supposedly seen at a church a few weeks before the final surge against the Islamic State in the summer of 2017.

And as soon as Mosul was reclaimed, MoS for external affairs VK Singh was sent to coordinate rescue efforts from Erbil. Singh travelled four times to Iraq since the fall of Mosul.

On Tuesday, Swaraj thanked him especially for his efforts.

On 16 July last year, she said that the Badush jail in northwest Mosul was the last known location of the Indian workers; Singh was subsequently sent there, too. It was in a mound in Badush that the mass graves of the Indian workers were finally found.