ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Sixteen Turkish workers kidnapped by masked gunmen east of Baghdad in early September have appeared in an online video promising their release on Sunday.
The news comes days after the UN backed a deal to extricate Syrian villagers under siege from rebels supported by Ankara, Reuters news agency reported.
In the video footage, one of the Turkish workers reads a statement in Arabic and says his captors had treated them well.
It is shown in the video that each worker received a Quran and an envelope containing money from the captors.
The captors claimed they would release the Turkish workers after civilians surrounded by Sunni insurgents in the villages of Kefraya and Al-Foua in northwestern Syria were allowed to leave safely.
On September 2, an Iraqi security official said several masked men entered the construction site of a sports complex and kidnapped the Turkish nationals, who were sleeping at the time.
Recently, two of the 18 kidnapped Turkish workers have been freed in the southern city of Basra in front of their Turkish company’s construction site.
The workers were employed by Nurol Insaat, a Turkish construction company, to build a sports compound in the Sadr City district of the Iraqi capital.
