The Telegraph's front-page story musters as much gung-ho optimism as it reasonably can. "SAS on alert to rescue snatched Britons ... A crisis team [has] been assembled with police hostage negotiators, MI6 officials and Arabic linguists preparing to fly out to Baghdad. On the ground the crisis team will liaise with the SAS. Norman Kember, the 76-year-old Christian peace activist, was freed in an SAS operation in Baghdad last year."
It is a very different story in the Mail. The financial expert and the four bodyguards protecting him who were kidnapped from the Iraqi finance ministry yesterday are "prized targets" for al-Qaida, the paper says. Nonetheless, it is a different faction - the Shia Mahdi army - that has claimed responsibility for their abduction, saying it was revenge for the killing of its Basra commander last week. That, the Times says, offers some hope, as the Mahdi army has shown some willingness to negotiate in the past. The "shadowy Sunni groups" of the type that kidnapped and killed Ken Bigley have not.
What is more, says the paper, if the kidnappers are Shia, Iran has "a good opportunity to demonstrate good faith" by using its influence to help release them.
"Accounts are confused as to how such highly trained and heavily armed professionals and the consultant they were protecting became hostages," says the Guardian. "Some reports claimed the kidnappers were wearing the camouflaged uniforms of Iraqi special police commandos. Others claimed they wore green combat gear that made them look 'unofficial'."
At 11.50am they burst into the ministry shouting: "Where are the foreigners? Where are the foreigners?"
"Things in Iraq are getting completely out of control and yesterday's captures show that not even government buildings are safe any more," a former security specialist tells the Telegraph. "One of the great problems I faced when I was there was that you just could not trust the Iraqis. They were ordinary workers by day - doing important jobs in the police and in the Iraqi National Guard - and terrorists by night."
As usual, the kidnapping was one violent incident among many in Iraq yesterday. The death toll among American forces in May has risen to 112. Forty Iraqis died in car bombings. "A continuation of this trend might increase domestic pressure on the US administration to cut short a troop surge whose actual effectiveness in stabilising Iraq is open to question," says the FT.
"The question now is whether the disaster will drag on because Brown lacks the courage of his alleged private convictions," writes Simon Jenkins in the Guardian. "Can he regain Britain's policy initiative and distance himself from America in pursuing military disengagement? Can he put the past behind him?
"Iraq is now wholly anarchic. Outsiders have lost all leverage to bring order to chaos. Brown must withdraw fast and leave local power to resolve itself as it may. He can then concentrate on what promises to be an even greater horror bequeathed him by Blair, but for which he too is responsible - Afghanistan. Every nightmare predicted by sceptics is coming to pass: 57 soldiers have died and one is now lost every week, dying to defeat the Taliban, which will not happen, and dying to suppress the opium crop, which will not happen."
Thomas Harding, the Telegraph's correspondent in Helmand, was on patrol with British troops when a 31-year-old corporal was killed by a Taliban bomb.
"'We have one times T1 casualty,' the commander said, referring to the most severe injury category. 'We require an emergency response team as soon as possible.' "While a helicopter was scrambled other soldiers had to approach the damaged vehicle carefully, checking for mines before extracting the casualty. "But very soon came the news that the T1 had become a T4 - the category for dead. "'Oh, f*** me, not one of ours,' said our radio operator, before throwing down his notebook."
* This is an excerpt from the Wrap, our emailed digest of the daily papers. Find out how to subscribe.
