IRAQ: Raging sectarian violence has pushed up the number of refugees in Iraq by 20,000 in the last 10 days alone, the migration ministry said yesterday.
In a statement, the ministry said that the total number of people now displaced had reached 182,154.
The crisis is likely to be far greater, because ministry figures include only those who formally ask for aid within the country, some of them living in tented camps. By excluding thousands fleeing abroad or seeking refuge with relatives, officials accept that the figure is an underestimate.
The figure of 182,154, based on the ministry's data of 30,359 families, is the number of those claiming aid since the February 22nd bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra sparked a new phase of killing by Shias and minority Sunni groups.
Some 27,744 people have fled Baghdad alone in the past five months. More and more houses are boarded up in the capital and many shops in once bustling commercial districts have shut after being attacked or threatened with violence.
One of those districts, Arasat, was hit by a mass kidnapping yesterday. Gunmen wearing uniforms of the Iraqi security forces abducted 25 people from an office in the area in central Baghdad in broad daylight, police said, highlighting the lawlessness afflicting the country more than three years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The gunmen pulled up in 15 four-wheel-drive vehicles and kidnapped employees and customers at the office on a street once known for expensive clothes and furniture.
Witnesses said that the offices were those of the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the al-Rawi mobile phone company.
"I was on the first floor of the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce and they took all the men downstairs. They were in camouflage army uniforms. They handcuffed the men and blindfolded them," said a witness who asked not to be named. "I and five others were left because all the cars were full."
Police said that among those kidnapped were the head and 11 employees of the chamber, which represents companies seeking to boost trade between postwar Iraq and firms in the United States.
US president George W. Bush and Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki have agreed to send thousands more troops to tackle sectarian and insurgent violence in Baghdad, where criminal gangs and kidnappers feed off the instability. Mr Maliki has already launched a crackdown, but it has failed to ease the communal violence, which has increased fears of a civil war.
More and more neighbourhoods are being carved up along sectarian lines. Officials acknowledge that sectarian militias and insurgents have infiltrated the security forces and have vowed to tackle the problem.
Underscoring concerns over sectarian strife, Iraqi defence minister Gen Abdel Qader Jassim and Gen Babaker Zebari, general commander of joint forces, urged army personnel and civilian employees of the military to avoid sectarianism.
"Joining the military and implementing national obligations need loyalty, and people should discard party, sectarian and racial affiliations and stay away from politicising the army," they said in a statement yesterday.
In an attack in Baghdad typical of the recent violence, gunmen killed Fakhri Salman, a brigadier in the Iraqi national intelligence service, an interior ministry source said.