But the lives of the eight men — seven private contractors and the only American service member who remains unaccounted — are a painful fragment of the war’s legacy, a haunting piece of unfinished business that the military will leave behind when it withdraws by the end of the year.
“He called and said, ‘I’m catching a plane tomorrow and I’ll be home,’?” said Jim Ake, whose son Jeffrey, a businessman from Indiana, vanished in 2005. “It didn’t happen. That was the last we heard from him.”
Like scores of other tasks — running convoys, flying helicopters and tracking incoming mortar fire — the military will soon leave the job of determining the fates of the missing largely to civilians. The military is still finalizing its plans, but the cases of the seven contractors are expected to be handed over to the American Embassy, with the missing soldier’s case going to the United States Central Command.
“It’s not like anybody’s saying, ‘O.K., we’re done, let’s forget these guys,’?” said Col. Michael Infanti, who supervised a unit that searches for the missing. “It ain’t happening.”
Even so, hope has drifted into a nagging uncertainty about the men’s fates, leaving families afraid that they will never find answers. Relatives who once received daily updates from F.B.I. agents and diplomats now go months without hearing from investigators. When they do, there are few breakthroughs. Years have passed without fresh leads, videos or phone calls from their kidnappers.
“We don’t know if he’s dead or alive,” said Kazwan Elias, whose brother, Aban, an Iraqi-American engineer from Denver, was kidnapped seven years ago. “We don’t know if they beheaded him or he’s in a jail somewhere. We just don’t know.”
The military has declared other kidnapping victims dead, even without recovering their bodies, and some family members have bowed to what seems like that inevitable conclusion. Others, though, hang their hopes on the transom between an administrative classification of “missing” and “deceased.”
In a fifth-floor Baghdad apartment overlooking the American Embassy and the heavily secured Green Zone, Sabriya Mahdi Naama clutches the belief that her husband, Abbas Kareem Naama, who was known as Tim, is alive after more than five years missing.
“I still believe he’s somewhere,” Ms. Naama said. “I am sure.”
Mr. Naama was a colonel in Saddam Hussein’s army who fled Iraq with his family in 1991, settling in San Diego. They became naturalized American citizens and supported Mr. Hussein’s ouster.
Mr. Naama met with Pentagon officials before the war, his family said, and his grown daughter wrote op-ed articles calling for the liberation of Iraq’s people.
In 2003, he returned to Iraq on the heels of the American Army. After a brief stint with the Coalition Provisional Authority, Mr. Naama, who was also a pharmacist, went to work with the health office of Iraq’s Defense Ministry, his family said.
He was taken one morning in 2005 as he left home to buy a newspaper. He was 58.
Three months later, the family received a phone call demanding $150,000 in ransom. They did not know who the callers were — Al Qaeda? The Shiite militias from the slums of Sadr City? — or if they were even the real kidnappers. But the family decided to pay them anyway, dropping off the money near an old soda factory.
Numerically speaking, the missing Americans — Jeffrey Ake, Aban Elias, Abbas Kareem Naama, Neenus Khoshaba, Bob Hamze, Dean Sadek, Hussain al-Zurufi and Staff Sgt. Ahmed Altaie — are little more than a footnote in Iraq. Their number pales in comparison to the thousands of Iraqis who disappeared during the bloodletting following the United States invasion. More than 10,000 Iraqis were kidnapped by criminal gangs, Sunni extremist groups and Shiite militias during the bloodiest years of sectarian fighting.
