Foreign hostages in Iraq
Members of the Iraqi insurgency began taking foreign hostages in Iraq beginning in April 2004. Since then, in a dramatic instance of Islamist kidnapping they have taken captive more than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis; among them, dozens of hostages were killed and others rescued or freed. In 2004, executions of captives were often filmed, and many were beheaded. However, the number of the recorded killings decreased significantly. Many hostages remain missing with no clue as to their whereabouts. The United States Department of State Hostage Working Group was organized by the U.S. Embassy, Baghdad , in the summer of 2004 to monitor foreign hostages in Iraq. The motives for these kidnappings include: The following is a list of known civilian foreign hostages in Iraq. Non-coalition. India. 39 killed, 1 escaped. Forty Indians — from Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal — went missing in June 2014 after Mosul fell to the Islamic State. In 2015, one of them, Harjit Masih, managed to flee from the clutches of Islamic State and said all other Indians were killed. But the External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj refused to buy his claims then. In July last year, she said  she would declare the missing persons dead until she had a concrete evidence. Sushma Swaraj had last year informed the Parliament that "sources who gave the government the confidence of not abandoning the search for the abducted Indians in Iraq include a head of state and a foreign minister of another country." She had then refused to disclose the identity of the sources, citing "diplomatic confidentiality". On 20 March 2018, Sushma Swaraj declared in the parliament that Thirty-nine missing Indian workers, who were taken hostage by ISIL in the Iraqi city of Mosul, have been killed. "I have concrete  proof that 39 Indians have been killed," Swaraj said about the Indians who were abducted by ISIL in 2014. "We wanted to give the families closure," she said. The physical remains of the Indians will be repatriated by the government in a special aircraft, the minister told parliament.