Iraq calmer but copycat kidnappings spread

updated 6:37 a.m. ET Oct. 13, 2008

WASHINGTON - Five years ago, retired Air Force intelligence officer Kirk von Ackermann became the first of 39 Americans to be kidnapped in Iraq. He's still missing, his wife fearing she'll never see him again.

Besides the personal tragedy, his disappearance and those that have followed have taken on a larger significance. They mark a turning point in terrorist tactics that U.S. intelligence officials say has produced a startling statistic: a 500 percent increase in foreigners taken hostage around the world as militants adopt the methods of the most violent figures in the Iraq insurgency.

Figures compiled by the Defense Intelligence Agency from classified and unclassified sources — provided exclusively to The Associated Press — show that in 2004, some 342 foreign and U.S. hostages were taken by terrorist and insurgent organizations.

More than 1,500 in '07
By 2006 that number had grown to 501. By 2007 it had jumped to more than 1,500, and it is on track to rise even higher this year, according to Thomas Brown, director of the office that analyzes information about prisoners of war and those missing in action.

His office does not count in the total the kidnapping of a country's own residents by terrorist or insurgent groups — a much more frequent and long-standing practice.

The office gave the AP data providing a more detailed breakdown, including:

• The total kidnappings, some based on classified information.
• The 1,079 foreign kidnappings since 2001 for which the hostage takers are unknown. That smaller number is drawn from public sources and includes cases in which the details of the disappearance are unverified.
• The 747 kidnappings of people traveling or working in foreign countries since 2001 for which the terrorist group responsible is known. Of those, also based on unclassified information, 73 are Americans and the fates of 11 remain unknown.

Those 11 include von Ackermann, who was working for a private contractor and vanished on Oct. 9, 2003, on the road between Kirkuk and Tikrit.

His wife, Megan von Ackermann, said the Army's Criminal Investigative Command told her he was believed to be the victim of an opportunistic kidnapping, not an organized effort, and that the man suspected of being behind it has disappeared.

"What we've got is a presumption of death; that's a certificate that's issued by the State Department," she said in an interview with the AP. "This is what our best guess is. The case is still open. The fact is we'll never really know what happened to him."

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