War is the hardest place to make judgments. Lives depend on it. Last Tuesday morning four armed British security guards protecting a British computer expert, who had the misfortune to be working inside the finance ministry building in one of the most dangerous parts of Baghdad, had to make a snap judgment: whether to shoot first and ask questions afterwards or to surrender.

Suddenly confronted by a group of armed men in Iraqi police uniforms who had burst in and taken them by surprise, so that escape with their client from the building was impossible, they had a split second to decide how to react.

Confused by the police uniforms, outnumbered and out-gunned, the security team gave up their weapons without a struggle and were abducted with the client they had been hired to protect.

It was the only decision to take, but one which as hostages they will now be agonising over as they face indefinite captivity, or worse, at the hands of a ruthless kidnap gang of unknown Iraqi insurgents.

The brazen kidnapping from the finance ministry was meticulously planned and executed. There have been previous attempts to kidnap British private security guards that have ended either with the insurgents or the security operators being killed and the incidents being hushed up. But this operation could not be.

It is the most audacious terrorist operation to be mounted against westerners since the 2003 invasion and has sent a seismic tremor through the Iraqi government whose inability to protect one of its key ministries has been exposed.

As a result, British and American authorities are urgently reviewing security measures for all westerners in ministry buildings. “If terrorists can take westerners from the finance ministry in broad daylight then no government building in Baghdad is safe for us any more,” said one security operator.

All week about 300 British troops led by the SAS and including some 100 intelligence experts from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, plus American special forces, were working on finding and retrieving the five British hostages.

Based in a faceless building inside the green zone known as the “station house”, the British are the same groups that were involved in the March 2006 rescue of Norman Kember and in hunting down the killers of Margaret Hassan, the British aid worker, when they earned the nickname “the Shadow Chasers”.

Nobody is suggesting it is going to be easy. One UK-based defence source said: “We all know from hard experience that the odds are stacked against us. We are looking for that one telltale sign that will push us in the right direction. This is a difficult and depressing challenge. We are using as much technology as we can, but they know that we will be watching and waiting for them to make a mistake.” THE question that the captive Britons, their companies and families will be asking is: could the abduction have been avoided?

The answer is almost certainly no, although in retrospect the methodology that the security men employed could have been different.

The four Britons, all experienced former soldiers, were on what they thought was a routine close protection mission on Tuesday morning. They were working in Baghdad for GardaWorld, the Canadian security company that recently took over Kroll Security International. In Baghdad one of its duties is to provide static protection for the British embassy.

Private security work in Baghdad is highly lucrative and highly dangerous. Private security staff comprise the second largest army in Iraq, bigger than the British Army there.

As the war has increasingly been contracted out, the Americans have allocated a third of their war budget to security to help to stabilise Iraq. Since the invasion nearly 1,000 private contractors have been killed including, according to official American government statistics, some 146 Britons, almost as many as the total number of UK troops killed in operations in Iraq.

GardaWorld prides itself on being a supremely professional organisation, hiring a greater percentage of its men from the SAS and the Parachute Regiment than any other security company in Iraq.

The mission of this particular four-man close protection team was to take a British computer expert working for Bearing-Point, an American company, from his base in the protected green zone to the finance ministry where he was stream-lining its computer system.

The distance was not great, about a 20-minute ride, but it meant driving through the bloody streets of Baghdad.

For anyone having business outside the green zone, this type of mission is normally carried out in an armoured Land Cruiser, a steel box, with a heavily armed private military escort operating in a secure three-vehicle “bubble” with interlocking arcs of fire.

Sometimes, because these armoured vehicles are easily recognised and targeted – they are all required to have identification stickers on their doors – private security companies have chosen to move their clients about more discreetly in low-profile saloon cars.

It is not clear what vehicles GardaWorld was using on Tuesday but the small size of the team suggests that it had opted for a low-profile operation to move the client unnoticed through the dangerous Baghdad streets to the finance ministry, which the team – reasonably enough – assumed to be a secure building.

As they left the green zone they passed a sign saying: “You are now departing the international zone. Attention, stop here and load weapon.”

The conventional wisdom has been that the run across town is the most dangerous part of close protection work. Amid the mayhem and random death of Baghdad the security team faced being shot at, hit by an improvised explosive device or rammed by a suicide bomber’s car.

Eyes skinned for any suspicious activity, they headed across the capital.

Some 15 minutes later they were at the ministry, having negotiated their way through a checkpoint in the concrete blast walls built against suicide bombers. Once inside they could breathe a sigh of relief – or so they thought.

Soon afterwards, however, the door opened and a group of armed men wearing police commando uniforms burst in, their leader shouting: “Where are the foreigners?” In the confusion, another western business consultant managed to escape. But the armed team of four British professionals and their British client were taken and driven away under guard in a convoy of official SUVs.

Had GardaWorld deployed a bigger team they might have had a protective screen round the building. They would have been able to give the team inside guarding the client advance warning of the kidnapping so that they could escape as they are trained to do.

The assumption is that the raid was an inside job, relying on the cooperation of Iraqis in the ministry who were either sympathetic to the kidnappers or had been intimidated to tip them off about the Britons’ presence.

The first information of the kidnapping came at 11.50am at a computerised control centre in the green zone, plugged directly into the US military, which is designed to track every convoy and private security team moving through the country. If a team is attacked an alarm, usually a panic button mounted inside a vehicle or carried personally, is pressed to alert the control centre.

In this instance the American quick reaction force was alerted to mount a rescue operation. But by the time it reached the ministry the five Britons had vanished – almost certainly, it is now believed, into nearby Sadr city, the Shi’ite stronghold tightly controlled by the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical antiAmerican cleric.

Five days on there is confusion and contradictory reporting over which insurgent group the kidnappers belong to. Increasingly the finger is being pointed at the Mahdi Army either with or without Sadr’s approval.

In London, Cobra, the government’s crisis response committee, was reportedly considering asking Iran for help in finding the missing Britons because of the strong influence that Tehran wields with the key Shi’ite groups.

One report circulating among security companies is that some of the kidnappers were heard speaking Farsi, the Iranian language. Both Wash-ington and London have repeatedly accused Tehran of arming and aiding the Shi’ite insurgency. However, there is scepticism about these charges as fielding Iranians on such a high-profile kidnap operation would represent a new departure for Tehran.

The kidnappings are ominously similar to a raid carried out on the higher education ministry in Baghdad last year by men in police uniforms. Many of the 200 captives of that raid are still missing. Many others have turned up dead.

One of the scourges of Iraq is that the police and the Shi’ite militias are frequently one and the same. The Mahdi Army is the most powerful militia force in Baghdad and has plenty to complain about at the moment. Some of its leaders are in prison and on May 25 Abu Qadir, also known as Wissam al-Waili, its former military chief in Basra, was killed by Iraqi forces as they tried to arrest him. The Mahdi Army claims he was killed by British troops.

On Friday a senior Iraqi government source told The Sunday Times that a senior Mahdi mediator was brought to the office of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, by Bahaa al-Aaraji, a Mahdi MP.

The mediator said the Mahdi Army had kidnapped the British in response to their leaders being targeted by American and British forces. He gave an assurance that the hostages were alive and were being well treated but said they would not be released until a number of conditions were met.

These include British troops staying out of Basra; British and American forces ceasing the targeting of Mahdi officials; and the release of all Mahdi Army prisoners, particularly Sheikh Abdul al-Hadi Darraji, the director of Sadr’s main offices in Sadr city. Darraji was the firebrand cleric’s chief spokesman until his arrest by the Americans in January.

In reply, Maliki called for the immediate release of the hostages and promised the mediator the Mahdi Army’s demands would eventually be met, the source said. He set up a special committee – independent of the defence and interior ministries, but including British and US officials – to try to reach a common agreement on the demands.

In London the Foreign Office said it had no knowledge of this reported development. And there were different views in intelligence circles about a possible Iranian connection.

Military intelligence sources argued that a Mahdi Army splinter group was responsible with some form of Iranian involvement. One source said: “We know that the Iranians have the military capability to carry off something like this. The Iraqis could have done it but their planning is terrible and it is more likely to have ended in a shooting match.”

Senior intelligence officials in London agreed it was clear that the kidnappers were “some manifestation of the Mahdi Army, whether acting on Sadr’s orders or not”, and that such groups had Iranian backing. But there was “no evidence of any kind that we can see” that the Iranians were directly involved. THE kidnapping of the Britons comes as pessimism grows about the outcome of the Americans’ much-touted “surge” strategy, which has boosted US troop levels in Iraq to 147,000.

The surge will be at full strength by the end of this month. While it has undoubtedly reduced the incidence of militia terror and random killings, it has been achieved at the cost of rising American casualties.

The rate at which Americans are being killed by insurgent attacks, principally using improvised explosive devices set off by the roadside and suicide bombings, is running at a record high. As many as 127 US soldiers died in May, making it the deadliest month for American casualties in Iraq for 2½ years.

Prominent Republicans are talking openly about a coming U-turn in American strategy, which could lead to a reduction in combat forces, a fall-back to super-bases and more training of Iraqi forces along the lines recommended by the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton.

Bush gave their report the brush-off last year but has begun to talk appreciatively about “Plan B-H”.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, said: “The handwriting is on the wall that we are going to go in a different direction in the fall and I expect the president to lead it.”

General David Petraeus, the US counterinsurgency expert who is now in command in Iraq, is due to report on the success of the strategy to Bush in September. He is unlikely to be the bearer of good news. Bush himself has predicted that August will be “bloody” as insurgents attempt to gain the initiative in advance of the report.

The fate of the five kidnapped Britons is just one more headache for the American and British forces who are grappling with the nightmare of an insurgency that will not die away.

To put the event in perspective, dozens of Iraqi men, women and children are being kidnapped and killed daily in sectarian violence across Baghdad. But the pressure to retrieve the GardaWorld four and their client is overwhelming, because they are British.

Whether they emerge alive or not, they are unlikely to be the last to have their names added to the sad list of British kidnap victims in the Iraq war.

Additional reporting: Mick Smith, Hala Jaber and Sarah Baxter

Times Recommends

• Karadzic found freedom in the Madhouse
• Bears kill guards at Russian mine
• Hotel is a monument to new North Korea