Video: Iraqis angry after US raids to find Britons

A British hostage-crisis team of up to 20 specialists, including SAS and police experts, is on standby in London ready to leave for Baghdad and help find the five Britons kidnapped by insurgents in a brazen daylight abduction yesterday, The Times has learnt.

Hundreds of US and Iraqi troops conducted raids in the Shia Muslim suburb of Sadr City this morning, searching for four security guards and a computer analyst taken from the Finance Ministry by as many as 40 men in police uniforms.

The team, put together by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, will fly out to Baghdad to join the British diplomats and military already working round-the-clock to determine which insurgent group abducted the Britons and to what end.

Foreign Office sources said it was still unclear which insurgent group was behind the abductions. However, the size of the hostage-taking group points the finger of suspicion at an organisation such as the Shia Mahdi Army which has connections inside the Ministry of Finance, where the kidnap took place.

British Special Forces will play the key role in tracking down the British hostages. The SAS and the Special Boat Service (SBS), the Royal Marine equivalent of the Army’s elite regiment, already have squadrons based in Baghdad, although their main task is to work alongside the American Special Forces, hunting down al-Qaeda.

The team of up 20 specialists put on standby on Tuesday night will leave for Baghdad as soon as the British Embassy in the city has some leads and requires their expertise to provide back-up in trying to track down the kidnappers.

“This is going to be a very difficult operation because Baghdad is effectively a war zone, so the military are going to be playing the major role in the attempts to find the hostages,” one source said.

The SAS and SBS have been engaged in covert missions against al-Qaeda for four years, serving with American troops from the US Joint Special Operations Command under Lieutenant-General Stanley McCrystal. US military sources said the special forces teams had killed a total of 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters, carrying out missions at night.

However, despite their heavy commitments, diplomatic sources said yesterday that elements of the British special forces already in Baghdad could be diverted to the hunt for the five missing Britons because of their unrivalled knowledge of the Iraqi security environment.

The police negotiators from the Metropolitan Police in the specialist team assembled in London will become involved only once there are clearer indications of who might be behind the abductions.

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, said it was not sensible to speculate on who had carried out the abduction.

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