Nearly half the money funding insurgents comes from outside the country, according to a senior Iraqi official. But officials suggest old sources are drying up and the radical groups are turning to ransom kidnappings - up to 10 a day in Baghdad alone - to finance their guerrilla attacks. Most victims are Iraqis, whose families pay between $3,000 and $50,000 for their release. Virtually none of the kidnappings is reported to the police.Other sources of funding include extortion, attacks on fuel tankers and other types of banditry, and possibly even government money earmarked for securing infrastructure and battling the insurgency - either directly or through corrupt officials. Most media attention falls on the 268 foreigners known to have been abducted since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Forty-four have been killed and 135 released, according to the Washington-based Brookings Institution. Three others escaped and three were rescued, it said, while the fate of the others was not known. The real figure of foreigners abducted is believed to be higher because truck drivers from Turkey and other neighboring countries are often believed ransomed with no publicity.
For the insurgents themselves, kidnappings offer a low-risk but high-yield option. Although some kidnappings may be purely criminal, many of them are carried out with such precision that the assailants may have had formal military training. Responsibility is often claimed by previously unknown groups, which the experts believe exist only in name and are meant to conceal the identity of those behind the kidnappers - insurgent groups seeking funding to finance attacks.Carroll's kidnapping was claimed by the "Revenge Brigade." Another group, the "Tawhid and Sunnah Brigade," said it kidnapped German engineers Thomas Nitzschke and Rene Braeunlich. "These are single-operation names," said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi who heads the Security and Terrorism Studies Program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "They protect the real group behind the kidnapping along with its credibility if the operation goes bad," he said.