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| - A German woman kidnapped in Baghdad earlier this week was freed overnight and is now in the care of her embassy, officials from the two countries said on Friday. "Security forces have freed activist Hella Mewis," Iraq's military spokesman Yahya Rasool said in a statement. Iraq's interior ministry said a joint task force, including the elite Falcons intelligence forces and federal police and anti-crime units, carried out the operation in east Baghdad. Interior Minister Othman al-Ghanemi handed Mewis over to the German embassy in Baghdad, the ministry said. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said he was "relieved" that Mewis was freed, confirmed she was at the embassy in Baghdad and thanked the Iraqi government for its efforts. Mewis has worked in Baghdad since 2013 and was one of the few westerners who lived outside the high-security Green Zone, where most diplomatic missions are located. She ran arts programmes at Iraqi collective Beit Tarkib and was close to many young photographers and painters. Mewis was leaving her office in central Baghdad on Monday evening when unidentified assailants in two cars, including a white pickup truck typically used by Iraqi security forces, abducted her. Police officers at the local station witnessed the abduction but did not intervene, the source added. Dhikra Sarsam, a friend of Mewis, said she had been in contact with her since her release. "She told me that she was doing well and had not been badly treated" in custody, Sarsam told AFP. "She will go very soon to Germany." The details of her release and the identity of her kidnappers remain hazy, with the interior ministry and Supreme Judicial Council saying they were still trying to find the perpetrators. A security source told AFP Mewis was freed from a location in east Baghdad. "Hours after she was kidnapped, security forces detained a man who incriminated several people who claim to belong to a faction close to the Hashed al-Shaabi," the source said. "They agreed to release him when they got all the information from him," the source added. "The security forces were then able to pressure the kidnappers to make them release the German hostage." Hardliners within the Hashed, a state-sponsored network of armed groups including many backed by neighbouring Iran, have been accused of kidnapping or intimidating Iraqi activists in the past. Swathes of east Baghdad, including the densely populated Sadr City district, are inaccessible to state security forces. The Hashed made no formal statement on Mewis's kidnapping, but on Friday a spokesman said he hoped Iraqi authorities would look into how she had been "secretly" present in Baghdad without security authorisation. Moqtada Sadr, a populist and divisive Shiite cleric, hailed Mewis's release and called her a "guest." Mewis had been worried following the killing of Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi scholar who had been supportive of anti-government protests last year, according to Sarsam. Large demonstrations erupted in Baghdad and Iraq's Shiite-majority south last year, railing against a government seen as corrupt, inept and beholden to Iran. Around 550 people died in protest-related violence, including two dozen activists who were shot dead by unidentified men, usually on motorcycles. Dozens more were kidnapped, some of whom were later released near their homes. The whereabouts of others remain unknown. Amnesty International has slammed the incidents as "a growing lethal campaign of harassment, intimidation, abductions and deliberate killings of activists and protesters". This year has seen a worrying spike in abductions of foreigners, who had not been targeted in several years. On New Year's Eve, two French freelance journalists were taken hostage for 36 hours and three French NGO workers were held for two months. In both cases, neither the kidnappers nor the conditions of the hostages' release were revealed. The government of Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi -- who is in the crosshairs of pro-Iran groups, because he repeatedly tried to clip their wings during an earlier stint as intelligence chief -- continues to call on armed factions to hand in their weapons and dismantle checkpoints. This government pressure may be behind the recent spike in violence in the capital, according to analysts. bur/mjg/sbh/dwo/hkb
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