by Deborah Haynes
BAGHDAD, July 22 (AFP) - A new hostage drama gripped Iraq on Thursday as a group of foreign truck drivers begged for their lives and a body with its head severed was found in a river, while the US military said it killed 25 rebels in violent clashes.
The battle between American forces and insurgents in the Sunni bastion of Ramadi on Wednesday was followed by another bloody day of bombs and shootings across the country that left at least three children dead.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has preached a hard line to quell Iraq's 15-month insurgency, and his security forces arrested about 20 Arabs suspected of links to terror plots during a dawn operation in Baghdad.
The latest terrified faces of men snatched by armed militants while driving trucks through Iraq were paraded as a Filipino lorry driver touched down in Manila at the end of his 17-day hostage ordeal, creating yet another crisis for Allawi, currently on a Middle East tour.
His interim government has warned that a decision by Manila to withdraw from Iraq to save Angelo de la Cruz, who was taken hostage and threatened with beheading, would fuel the kidnapping epidemic.
The fear appeared justified, as a group calling itself "Black Flags" said in a video made available to AFP that it had taken seven hostages -- three Kenyans, three Indians and an Egyptian. The recording could not be authenticated.
In a video broadcast Wednesday, the same group said it would execute the captives one by one if their Kuwaiti employer -- identified by the Kenyan government as Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport -- did not pull out of Iraq.
Visibly frightened, the truckers were allowed to send a message home to their families and all vowed never to return to Iraq or work for the US-led forces here.
"We want to go home, please help us so that we are not cut up into pieces because then you would bear the guilt of orphaning our children," said one of the hostages, speaking in a thick Egyptian accent.
An Indian captive added: "We are being held here against our will because they feel we are supporting America. ... We are three Indians, three Kenyans and one Egyptian."
India's envoy to Iraq rushed back to Baghdad as a rattled New Delhi vowed to do "whatever possible" to secure the release of its three truckers.
For Cairo, the news of the latest hostage came after another kidnapped trucker from Egypt, Sayed Mohammed Sayed al-Garbawi, was set free once his employer -- a Saudi company -- agreed to end all its activities in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Iraqi police said the decapitated body of a man believed to be a foreigner had been found in the Tigris River in northern Iraq.
The corpse, wearing a red jumpsuit, was discovered along with its head in a plastic bag in the town of Al-Zuwiya, north of Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, said Colonel Ismail al-Jubburi.
Jubburi said police were confirming the identity of the body, but that they "presume he is not Iraqi."
Several foreigners taken hostage in Iraq were dressed in orange outfits similar to those worn by prisoners at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then slain by their captors.
The finding followed the retrieval from the same river on July 14 of a headless corpse wearing an orange outfit, which was handed to the US army.
A military spokesman in Tikrit had no information on the latest discovery.
Amid the hostage crisis, US forces revealed a bloody scene of chaos in the restive city of Ramadi west of Baghdad, where gunfire and bombings were reported on Wednesday.
US forces, backed by air support, battled up to 100 insurgents after militants set off a bomb near a Marine convoy and then attacked it with rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire, the military said in a statement.
At the end of a day of fierce fighting, 25 insurgents were killed, 17 wounded and 25 people detained, the military said. On their side, 13 Marines and one soldier were injured.
In a further effort to crush the insurgency that burgeoned during the US-led occupation, Iraqi and US forces conducted a raid on a trouble spot in Baghdad and arrested 20 Arabs, mostly from Syria, suspected of supporting terrorists, an interior ministry official said.
Allawi, currently on a tour of the Middle East as he enters his fourth week in power, is anxious to prove his unelected government has teeth.
Despite the tough talk, low-level violence rumbled on as two girls died and three people were injured, including a woman, when the minibus they were travelling in struck a roadside bomb in Baghdad, police and hospital sources said.
In addition a boy street cleaner was blown to pieces when he accidentally triggered a bomb left on the road near a mosque in the city.
Five more people -- three policemen in Kut and two vendors of alcoholic beverages in Nasiriyah -- were shot dead, police said.
Meanwhile, oil exports from Iraq's northern fields are expected to resume soon after engineers complete repair work on the export pipeline, an industry official said.