Aid workers who went missing in Baghdad return home to France

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Four Christian NGO workers who had gone missing in Baghdad have been returned home safely, the charity announced via Twitter this morning.

French charity SOS Chretiens d'Orient (Christians of the Middle East) said on Twitter it welcomed the release of its four employees, three French nationals and one Iraqi, and thanked supporters for an "incredible movement of prayers and solidarity."

Antoine Brochon, Julien Dittmar, Alexandre Goodarzy and Tariq Mattoka had gone missing in Baghdad on January 20, as the Iraqi capital was gripped by protests and geopolitical tensions after a US drone strike killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

The release of the four men comes as France withdraws 200 military personnel working in Iraq, which are mostly trainers to local armed forces, blaming complications arising from the COVID-19 crisis.

The four had gone missing in late January, near the French embassy in Baghdad. Colleagues become worried when didn't show up to a 5pm meeting, and feared that they had been kidnapped – but had received no demands for a ransom payment in exchange for their safe release.

Confirming that the four had been kidnapped, a statement by the French presidency thanked Iraqi authorities for their cooperation said that France had made "every effort to reach this outcome," without specifying whether a ransom had been paid.

SOS Christians had recently relocated its staff to Erbil for security reasons, but the group was in Baghdad to renew their visas and observe a project being supported by the charity to build a school in Baghdad's Christian quarter, a spokesperson told France24 following their disappearance. Mired in the political escalation between Iran and the US, the Baghdad government said it didn't have any leads on their whereabouts.

The charity began working in Iraq in 2014, when militants overran Iraq from the Nineveh plains and declared themselves a caliphate in Mosul. SOS Chretiens d'Orient mobilized an emergency response geared at aiding some 80,000 Christians who were displaced to Erbil, in the relatively safe Kurdistan region in northern Iraq.