ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) released on Thursday 31 Kurdish and Turkish truck drivers from Turkey it had taken hostage on the first day of their attack on Mosul last month.
Before boarding a flight at Erbil international airport to return home, one of the drivers told Rudaw, “We always knew that the ISIS wouldn’t kill us.”
“The ISIS didn’t torture us,” he said. “They kept saying that we were brothers and they gave us good food.”
The drivers were rounded up by the ISIS fighters on June 10 in Mosul and held in an old US army base near the city, according to one of the drivers.
“We were never worried about being killed,” said one driver at Erbil airport. “We were scared only the first day.”
Ibrahim Shekhallah, the mayor of Makhmur—a Kurdish town between Erbil and Mosul—told Rudaw that the truck drivers were handed over to Turkish consulate officials in his town from where they were taken to the airport to be sent home.
“They [ISIS] didn’t pressure us or anything,” said one driver. “The only thing was that the air [in the base] was very hot.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu welcomed the release of the drivers.
Davutoglu told reporters that his government was still working on securing the release of more than 40 staff members of the Turkish consulate in Mosul who are still missing.
Tens of thousands of Kurdish and Turkish citizens from Turkey work in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. Mosul which is Iraq’s second largest city, is also a major trade partner of neighboring Turkey.
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