ANKARA – Turkey’s state-run news agency says 18 Turkish workers who were kidnapped in Baghdad have been released.
The Anadolu Agency says Wednesday the workers were freed in the city of Basra and were traveling to Baghdad. There was no immediate information on the circumstances of their release.
The men, employed by Turkish construction company Nurol Insaat, were snatched up from a construction site in Baghdad’s Shiite-dominated Sadr City on Sept. 2. An Iraqi national was kidnapped along with the Turks.
The group that captured them had demanded that Turkey halt the flow of militants into Iraq, lift what it called a “siege” on Syrian Shiite cities and stop the passage of oil from Iraq’s northern Kurdish region via Turkey in defiance of Baghdad.